The effects of glycosylation inhibitors on the proliferation of a spontaneously transformed cell line (3T6) in vitro.

We have examined the effects of different inhibitors of glycosylation processing on the proliferation of a spontaneously transformed murine cell line (3T6) in vitro. It was found that whereas two compounds that specifically inhibit distal steps in the glycosylation chain (swainsonine and castanospermine) only exerted marginal inhibitory effects on cell multiplication, a proximal inhibitor (tunicamycin) efficiently decreased the rate of DNA synthesis in a dose-dependent fashion. This tunicamycin-induced inhibitory effect on cell proliferation was cell cycle-specific, in the sense that cells in G1 only were blocked in their cell cycle progression. Like others (Volpe & Goldberg, 1983), we found that tunicamycin inhibited the activity of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme-A reductase (HMG-CoA), which constitutes the ratelimiting step in the biosynthesis of cholesterol and isoprenoid derivatives, by catalysing the reduction of HMG-CoA to mevalonate, and it has been suggested that it plays a role in the control of cell proliferation and in tumour transformation. This raises the question as to whether tunicamycin exerts its inhibitory effects on cell proliferation via the isprene-synthetic pathway in addition to its effects on aspargine-linked glycosylation. By adding exogenous mevalonate, the rate-limiting step at which HMG-CoA reductase converts HMG-CoA to mevalonate can be bypassed. We found that addition of mevalonate partially reverses the effects of tunicamycin on cell proliferation. This suggests that tunicamycin exerts different effects, which taken together lead to a cessation of cell proliferation. One of these effects is likely to be mediated via the mevalonate-synthetic pathway.