Fig. 5.

Functional proteins involved in cell proliferation and cell cycle progression that were uniquely altered in the combination treatment group. (A) IPA prediction of upstream regulators of the uniquely altered proteins in cell growth and cell death. The predicted key regulators included Jnk, p38/MAPK, Insulin, PI3K complex, Pkcs, ERK1/2, NFκB. Red and green colors, respectively, represent the up- and down-regulated molecules, the expression ratio is shown under each dysregulated molecule, treated/control. The quantitative data is from samples with combined drugs treatment for 72 h; white represents the predicted upstream regulators of these uniquely altered proteins. Those with purple circles were further validated by immunoassay. (B) STRING network of altered molecules that were exclusively induced by combined birinapant/paclitaxel and associated with cell cycle progression. Proteins are represented as nodes in the figure. The confidence of protein-protein interactions is represented by the thickness of lines linking molecules. All nodes involved in cell cycle progression were included in interactions and most were of high confidence (>0.700).