Drug-Induced Differentiation Figure 7. The effect of differentiation-inducing drugs in NT2 cells can be rescued by caspase and JNK inhibitors. OCT4 is a substrate of CASPASE-7. (A) Quantitative RT-PCR expression analysis of the differentiation markers SNAP25, HOXA1 and of CASPASE-7 after 3 days of treatment with araC, DAC or RA alone or in combination with caspase Inhibitors I and II (Casp-I, Casp-II), JNK inhibitor 1 (JNK), a combination of both caspase inhibitors (Casp-I/II) and a mixture of all three inhibitors (all). Diagrams show fold differences compared to araC-, DAC- and RA-treatment alone. Co- treatment with caspase inhibitors leads to reduced gene expression after araC and DAC treatment. All qRT-PCR measurements were repeated at least three times and internally normalised to the corresponding lamin-b and b-actin expression levels. P-values (Student’s t-test) for the expression differences between only drug-treated (2) and co-treated cells for highly significant cases (p#0.01) are shown. Asterisks indicate expression values PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 9 May 2010 | Volume 5 | Issue 5 | e10726