Analyzing Gene Expression with the Use of Serine/Threonine Phosphatase Inhibitors.

This chapter describes the use of phosphatase-inhibitory compounds to study gene regulation. Serine/threonine protein phosphatase inhibitors can be divided into two groups: The first group (see Table 1) comprises environmental toxins and other natural products that are mostly produced by micro-organisms, such as blue-green algae or soil bacteria. They are structurally very diverse molecules that share the ability to inhibit phosphatase activity (1-3). The best known and most widely used compound of this group is okadaic acid, a polyether fatty acid derivative that is produced by marine dinoflagellates (4). Its use in research became quite widespread during the last few years, and the number of publications describing its effects have increased enormously. In addition, a number of natural and synthetic compounds have been discovered recently, which are useful as inhibitors of protein phosphatase type 2B (also called calcineurin) (5,6) see Table 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]