In the present study, we investigated the activation of protein kinase C （PKC） family in mouse embryonic fibroblast NIH3T3 cells using gadolinium chloride as a representative lanthanide ion. With live cell imaging system and confocal laser scanning microscopy, we found that the treatment of 50 μM GdCI3 promoted cell survival under the condition of serum-starvation. Moreover, better cell attachment and cytoskeleton reorganization were also observed. Additionally, GdC13 treatment resulted in the phosphorylation of PKC family at different time points. Furthermore, bisindolylmaleimide （a PKCpan inhibitor） could efficiently reduce the level of phosphorylated PKCpan （βIISer660）, alleviating ERK activation induced by GdC13. This finding indicated that the PKC activation was involved in GdC13-induced MAPK/ERK signaling and thus might contribute to GdClβ-indueed cell cycle progression and cell survival.
Lanthanum ions （La3＋） have been reported to exert profound effects on the proliferation of NIH 3T3 mouse embryonic fibroblasts. In the present studies, the pro-proliferative effect of La3＋ on NIH 3T3 cells was further characterized, and its impacts on the cell cycle kinetics were analyzed in detail by cell cycle arrest-and-release and pulse BrdU-labeling and chasing experiments. The results show that La3＋ promoted the proliferation of NIH 3T3 cells after 12 h and the ECs0 was 2.4 ktM after 48 h. Such effect was also confirmed by enhanced BrdU incorporation. La3＋ stimulated more cells to pass through the G1/S checkpoint into S phase, but did not change the length of cell cycle. Furthermore, La3＋-treatment increased the protein levels and nuclear localization of cyclin D 1 and c-Myc, two key regulators of G1/S checkpoint, as demonstrated by immunostaining. The pro-proliferative effects of La3＋ share striking similarity with that of Gd3＋, and provided new information regarding the cellular biological activities of lanthanides.
