Leishmania tropica promastigotes that are highly resistant to methotrexate, a dihydrofolate reductase inhibitor, have been developed. Organisms resistant to 1 mM methotrexate have a 40-fold increase in dihydrofolate reductase which is associated with thymidylate synthetase, and they contain amplified regions of DNA that may be directly visualized on stained gels of restriction digests. The ampl...

Murine 3T6 cells selected in increasing concentrations of methotrexate were unstable with respect to dihydrofolate reductase overproduction and methotrexate resistance when they are cultured in the absence of methotrexate. An analysis of the karyotypes of these resistant cells revealed the presence of numerous double minute chromosomes. We observed essentially identical kinetics of loss of dihy...

Variants of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), which confer resistance to antifolates, are used as dominant selectable markers in vitro and in vivo and may be useful in the context of gene therapy. To identify improved mutant human DHFRs with increased catalytic efficiency and decreased binding to methotrexate, we constructed by site-directed mutagenesis four variants with substitutions at both Le...

Trimetrexate (TMQ) is a lipophilic antifolate shown to have antitumor activity in humans. TMQ-resistant sublines of the MOLT-3 human acute lymphoblastic leukemia cell line were developed and were designated as MOLT-3/TMQ200, MOLT-3/TMQ800, and MOLT-3/TMQ2500 based on degrees of resistance to TMQ. The TMQ resistance was accompanied by 5- to 7-fold increases in dihydrofolate reductase activity an...

this article describes a simple and fast high-performance liquid chromatography method for the determination of methotrexate (mtx) in plasma. samples were collocted from children receiving high-dose mtx at shafa hospital (ahvaz university of medical sciences, ahvaz, iran) at various times after the end of eachinfusion. plasma was deproteinized with trichloroacetic acid and the supernatant was i...

Lymphoblasts in bone marrow samples, obtained from 43 children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at diagnosis, were incubated with 1.0 mumols/L [3H] methotrexate for 24 hours in vitro. Nonexchangeable methotrexate and methotrexate polyglutamates were separated and quantitated. Event-free survival at 5 years was 38% +/- 9% for all 43 patients (27 failures), and 44% +/- 10% for the 35 with non-T,...

BACKGROUND Methotrexate is transported into the cell by the reduced folate carrier (RFC) and out of the cell by members of the multidrug resistance protein family (MRP). Transport proteins may affect the therapeutic efficacy of this drug in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. OBJECTIVE To investigate the potential benefit of the presence of RFC and the absence of functional MRP for the effica...

The aim of this study was to identify and characterize mechanisms of resistance to antifolate drugs in African trypanosomes. Genome-wide RNAi library screens were undertaken in bloodstream form Trypanosoma brucei exposed to the antifolates methotrexate and raltitrexed. In conjunction with drug susceptibility and folate transport studies, RNAi knockdown was used to validate the functions of the ...