2170

FABP3

FABP11|H-FABP|M-FABP|MDGI|O-FABP;fatty acid binding protein 3, muscle and heart;FABP3;fatty acid binding protein 3, muscle and heart

Fatty acid-binding protein 3, muscle|fatty acid binding protein 11|fatty acid-binding protein, heart|heart-type fatty acid-binding protein|mammary-derived growth inhibitor|muscle fatty acid-binding protein

1p33-p32

protein-coding

The gene encoding mammary-derived growth inhibitor (MDGI), a protein previously purified from bovine mammary gland and shown to have modest antiproliferative activity for human breast cancer cells in vitro, is demonstrated to function as a potent tumor suppressor gene. Human breast cancer cells transfected with a MDGI expression construct exhibited differentiated morphology, reduced proliferation rate, reduced clonogenicity in soft agar, and reduced tumorgenicity in nude mice relative to mock-transfected or untransfected controls. We mapped the human homologue of this gene to chromosome 1p33-35, a locus previously shown to exhibit frequent loss of heterozygosity in human breast cancer. MDGI immunoreactivity was detected in epithelial cells of human breast tissue, but not on ductal carcinoma cells on the same sections. Our results suggest that MDGI is a strong candidate for the distal 1p breast tumor suppressor gene. Furthermore, as prior reports have demonstrated that MDGI is hormonally regulated in breast epithelial cells and maximally expressed at the time of maximal differentiated function (just prior to lactation), MDGI is a candidate mediator of the differentiating effect of pregnancy on breast epithelial cells, which may be involved in the protective effect of early parity on subsequent breast cancer incidence.

The developing renal system has long been exploited to study the regulation of gene expression during mesenchymal-epithelial transitions. Several transcription factors, including WT1 and PAX8, are expressed early in nephrogenesis and play a key role in this process. The expression of PAX8 occurs in the induced mesenchyme of the developing kidney prior to the upregulation of WT1 levels in the same cells. In this report, we assessed whether the Pax-8 gene product resides upstream of wt1 in a common regulatory pathway. Transfection studies, as well as gel-shift assays, indicate that PAX8 transactivates wt1 through elements within a 38 bp conserved motif, present in human and murine promoters. Two PAX8 isoforms, generated by alternative splicing at the C-terminus and previously thought to lack transactivation potential, were found to be capable of activating wt1 expression. We also demonstrate that the endogenous wt1 promoter can be upregulated by exogenously supplied PAX8, suggesting that a function of PAX8 during mesenchymal--epithelial cell transition in renal development is to induce wt1 gene expression.