Two ways in the cell interact to spur cancer growth

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Inactivation of two ways, the cell division deeply regulate disrupts cell cycle of control and leads to tumor growth according to researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago College of medicine at.

The researchers describe how the two way interact to their combined effects in a study in the journal genes and development, which is available online.

Tumor growth occurs after the regulation of the cell cycle, the cascade of events that lead in the Division and duplication of a cell. One critical way to regulate the cell cycle is the retinoblastoma (RB) tumor suppressor way. The RB pathway is mutated or functional in most human cancers are inactivated.

Maxim Alexandrovich Frolov, UIC Associate Professor of Biochemistry and molecular genetics, models development of human cancer by studying the inactivation of RB in Drosophila melanogaster. In flying, a deficiency in the RB pathway alone, says he defects in cell proliferation, surprisingly caused only subtly, but leads not to a full blown tumor.

"We wanted to understand why," he said.

One possible explanation was that other regulatory mechanisms, together with the RB pathway worked. In their previous studies, the researchers found a path called hippo, that regulation of cell proliferation seemed to work with RB.

In the new study, Frolov and his colleagues have shown that at the same time copy name led both ways to a marked improvement in the tumor growth. The researchers were able to the mechanism for the synergy between these two ways to track. They found that inactivation of the Hippo and RB ways in a up Regulaton from a unique set of genes.

"We saw that the genes important to cell proliferation and cell cycle regulation unduly are expressed in these cells," Frolov said. The genes were not up regulated if RB or Hippo pathway alone was inactivated.

"We found that transcription factors-proteins that activate genes and--disable participants in each of the two railways cooperate in inducing expression this cell cycle specific genes, what to inappropriate cell proliferation," he said.

The road is able to cross-talk with the RB pathway Hippo and disrupt cell cycle regulation to tumors grow can important implications for understanding the complexity of the mutations in the human cancers, said Frolov. The finding suggests that it can other factors, the work with RB to promote its growth.

He says "We should be more cooperating mutations in the human cancers,".

Source: University of Illinois at Chicago