Our recent studies have shown that intracellular levels of sphingosine, an endogenous PKC inhibitor, increase during apoptosis resulting from phorbol ester (PMA)-induced terminal differentiation of human myeloid leukemic HL-60 cells, and have suggested that sphingosine may function as an endogenous mediator of apoptosis in these cells [Ohta, et al. (1995) Cancer Res. 55, 691-697]. We report here that apoptosis induced by PMA, sphingosine, and N,N-dimethylsphingosine (DMS) was accompanied by a concomitant decrease of bcl-2 expression in both RNA and protein levels in HL-60 cells, while expression of bcl-XL and bax mRNA did not change, and neither sphingosine nor DMS induced differentiation of HL-60 cells. In contrast, in apoptotic cells induced by pharmaceutical PKC inhibitors H7 or staurosporine, expression of bcl-2 did not change nor did the intracellular sphingosine concentration. These results suggest that sphingosine may function as an endogenous mediator of apoptotic signaling in PMA-induced terminal differentiation of HL-60 cells through bcl-2 down-regulation, probably independent from PKC inhibition.