Members of both calpain and caspase protease families can degrade several components of focal adhesions, leading to disassembly of these complexes. In this report, we investigated the disappearance of tensin from cell adhesion sites of chicken embryonic fibroblast cells (CEFs) exposed to etoposide and demonstrated that loss of tensin from cell adhesions during etoposide-induced apoptosis may be due to degradation of tensin by caspase-3. Tensin cleavage by caspase-3 at the sequence DYPD(1226)G separates the amino-terminal region containing the actin binding domain and the carboxyl-terminal region containing the SH2 domain. The resultant carboxyl-terminal fragment of tensin is unable to bind phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3-kinase) transducing cell survival signaling. We also demonstrated that overexpression of the amino-terminal tensin fragment induced disruption of actin cytoskeleton in chicken embryonic fibroblasts. Therefore, caspase-mediated cleavage of tensin contributes to the disruption of actin organization and interrupts ECM-mediated survival signals through phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.