, 2004, Grubb et al., 2006, Lipecka et al., 2006 and Norez et al., 2006). Besides the effect on CFTR, little is known about the effect of curcumin on other chloride channels. Best et al. describe an activation of the swelling-activated chloride current IClswell in rat pancreatic cells by curcumin ( Best et al., 2007). IClswell is elicited after hypotonic shock during the homeostatic mechanism regulatory volume decrease (RVD). As a consequence, the exit of osmolytes from the cell drives an osmotic water efflux, mTOR inhibitor allowing the swollen cell to regain its original volume ( Furst et al., 2002). Cell volume alterations are involved in numerous cellular events like epithelial transport, metabolic processes,

hormone secretion, cell migration, proliferation and apoptosis ( Jakab et al., 2002 and Lang et al., 2006). Apoptotic stimuli have been reported to

rapidly activate Cl− conductances in a large variety of cell types. Cell shrinkage, the so-called apoptotic volume decrease (AVD), is an early event in apoptosis, and the efflux of Cl− contributes to this process. In a variety of cell types (epithelial cells, cardiomyocytes, neurons), the AVD-inducing anion channel was determined to be the volume-sensitive swelling-activated chloride channel, which is usually activated by hypotonicity under non-apoptotic conditions ( Lang et al., 2000, Lang et al., 2007, Okada et al., 2006 and Pasantes-Morales and Tuz, 2006). Since it is known that substances selleck kinase inhibitor able to modulate chloride channel activity can also interfere with the apoptotic process ( Shimizu et al., 2008), we set out to investigate whether or not curcumin is able to induce apoptosis via the modulation of chloride channels in human embryonic kidney (HEK) cells. Surprisingly, in contrast to Best et al. (2007), we did not find any significant direct effect of 10 or 50 μM curcumin on IClswell; however, we discovered that curcumin

indirectly (i) activates IClswell at low concentrations (<5.0 μM), which most likely occurs by inducing apoptosis, and (ii) at higher concentrations (≥5.0 μM) not inhibits IClswell and causes an increase of cell volume and cell cycle arrest. Human renal HEK293 Phoenix cells (DiCiommo et al., 2004) were cultured in Minimum Essential Eagle Medium (MEM, Sigma, Austria) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS, Cambrex Bio Science), 2 mM l-glutamine, 100 μg/ml streptomycin, 100 U/ml penicillin and 1 mM pyruvic acid (sodium salt). Human colorectal adenocarcinoma HT-29 cells were cultured in McCoy’s 5a modified medium (Sigma, Austria) supplemented with 10% FBS, 100 μg/ml streptomycin and 100 U/ml penicillin. The cells were maintained at 37 °C, 5% CO2, 95% air and 100% humidity. Subcultures were routinely established every second to third day by seeding the cells into 100 mm diameter Petri dishes following trypsin/EDTA treatment.