The stable transfected cell lines, pEGFP-N/N1003A (expressing only the green fluorescence protein, GFP, from the vector), and pEGFP-mαB-N/N1003A (expressing the fusion protein of GFP and mouse αB-crystallin) were established and maintained as described previously (Li et al., 2001 ). The stable cell lines carrying either the p53 expression construct pCMV-p53 or its corresponding vector pCMV-neo were described previously (Miyashita and Reed, 1995 ). The antisense-p53 construct was created by first subcloning the HindIII-EcoRI fragment of p53 into pBluescript SK(+/-) vector and then isolate the EcoRI-SalI fragment and ligated back into pCMV-Neo vector. The mouse Bax cDNA was kindly provided by Dr. Stanley Korsmeyer (Oltvai et al., 1993 ). This cDNA was subcloned from pBluescript-SK into pCI-neo vector at the EcoRI site. The antisense-Bax construct was created with opposite insertion of the cDNA into pCI vector. The RAF and RAS dominant negative mutants (Rosen et al., 1994 ; Mischak et al., 1996 ) were obtained from the BD Biosciences Clontech. The ERK dominant negative mutant was described previously (Huang et al., 1999 ). These constructs were amplified in DH-5α and purified by two rounds of CsCl ultracentrifugation (Ausubel et al., 2002 ) or by Plasmid Maxiprep kit (catalog no. 732-6130; Bio-Rad, Hercules, CA). Transfection of N/N1003A cells was performed using electroporation with a BTX Electro Cell manipulator as we described previously (Xiang et al., 2002 ; Wang et al., 2005 ) or with Lipofectamine 2000 from the Invitrogen (Feng et al., 2004 ). The transfected cells were then subjected to neomycin (G418) selection for 4-6 wk before stable lines of individual clones were obtained.