Vitamin D 3 (VD)2 is a steroid hormone best known for its role in calcium homeostasis. Its deficiency causes rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. VD also regulates the proliferation and differentiation of normal and malignant cells of many tissue types. Because sunlight controls the first step of VD synthesis, namely, the photoconversion of 7-dehydrocholesterol to vitamin D 3 (1), the hormone is considered a "sun" medicine that is effective for the treatment and/or prevention of type II rickets, osteoporosis, autoimmune disorders, as well as epithelial cancers of many types.Ovarian cancer (OCa) is a fatal disease with an overall 5-year survival rate of about 40%. OCa mortality and incidence rates are lower in countries within 20 degrees of the equator (2) where there is a high amount of sunlight. In the United States, women between the ages of 45 and 54 living in the North have 5 times the OCa mortality rate of women living in Southern states (3). The inverse correlation between sunlight exposure and OCa mortality indicates that decreased synthesis of VD may contribute to OCa initiation and/or progression. This idea has been further substantiated by recent studies (4 -7) showing that 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D 3 (1,25-(OH) 2 D 3 ), the active form of VD, inhibits the growth of multiple OCa cell lines (4 -6) and OVCAR3 tumor xenografts in nude mice (7).Effects of VD are mediated through the vitamin D receptor (8), which is a member of the steroid/thyroid receptor superfamily of ligand-regulated transcription factors. In response to the activation by 1,25-(OH) 2 D 3 , the receptor recruits multiple co-activators, including members of the p160 SRC family (9), which are associated with histone acetyltransferase activity, and the DRIP complex (10), which serves as a mediator between the vitamin D receptor and RNA polymerase II complex. Recent studies (11) have suggested that the anti-tumor activity of VD is mediated through its effect on gene transcription. In OCa cells, we have shown that the transcriptional up-regulation of GADD45 is essential for the 1,25-(OH) 2 D 3 -induced cell cycle arrest at the G 2 /M checkpoint (4). 1,25-(OH) 2 D 3 also increases p27 protein stability in OCa cells through down-regulation of Skp2 and cyclin E mRNA to induce cell cycle arrest at the G 1 /S checkpoint (6). These studies suggest that the action of 1,25-(OH) 2 D 3 through the nuclear activation of vitamin D receptor is important for the anti-tumor activity of the hormone in OCa.Because the anti-tumor activity of 1,25-(OH) 2 D 3 is mediated through regulation of gene expression, a more complete understanding of the mechanism underlying 1,25-(OH) 2 D 3 action in OCa cells necessitates identification of changes in gene expression induced by the hormone. In the present study, we profile transcriptional changes in OVCAR3 cells induced by 1,25-(OH) 2 D 3 using multiple independent microarray analyses. We concentrated our subsequent analysis to a few apoptosis-related genes from this list. Our studies reveal that 1,25-(OH) 2 D 3...