Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0032463 (polycythemia vera)
 3,374 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The aberrant overexpression of interleukin 6 (IL-6) is implicated as an autocrine mechanism in the enhanced proliferation of the neoplastic cell elements in various B- and T-cell malignancies and in some carcinomas and sarcomas; many of these neoplasms have been shown to be associated with a mutated p53 gene. The possibility that wild-type (wt) p53, a nuclear tumor-suppressor protein, but not its transforming mutants might serve to repress IL-6 gene expression was investigated in HeLa cells. We transiently cotransfected these cells with constitutive cytomegalovirus (CMV) enhancer/promoter expression plasmids overproducing wt or mutant human or murine p53 and with appropriate chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) reporter plasmids containing the promoter elements of human IL-6, c-fos, or beta-actin genes or of porcine major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I gene in pN-38 to evaluate the effect of the various p53 species on these promoters. Murine and human wt p53 derived from pCMVNc9 and pC53-SN3, respectively, strongly repressed the IL-6 (promoter position -225 to +13), c-fos (-711 to +42), beta-actin (-3400 to +912), and MHC (-528 to -38) promoters in serum-induced HeLa cells; additionally, IL-6 promoter/CAT transcription unit constructs induced by IL-1, phorbol ester, or pseudorabies virus were also repressed by wt human and murine p53. The murine transforming mutant p53 (pCMVc5) was less active in repressing the IL-6, c-fos, beta-actin, and MHC promoter constructs. The human p53 mutant derived from pC53-SCX3 was also less active than the wt protein in repressing the IL-6, c-fos, beta-actin, and MHC promoters, except that serum-induced IL-6/CAT expression was equally repressed by both human wt and mutant p53. In similar transient transfection experiments in HeLa cells, overexpression of the wt human retinoblastoma susceptibility gene product, RB, was found to repress the serum-induced IL-6 (-225 to +13), c-fos (-711 to +42), and beta-actin (-3400 to +912) promoters but not the PRV-induced IL-6 (-110 to +13) or the serum-induced MHC (-528 to -38) promoters. These observations identify transcriptional repression as a property of p53 and suggest that p53 and RB may be involved as transcriptional repressors in modulating IL-6 gene expression during cellular differentiation and oncogenesis.
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PMID:Repression of the interleukin 6 gene promoter by p53 and the retinoblastoma susceptibility gene product. 165 55

The retinoblastoma (Rb), cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK), and CDK inhibitor genes regulate cell generation, and deregulation can produce increased cell growth and tumorigenesis. Polycythemia vera (PV) is a clonal myeloproliferative disease where the mechanism producing increased hematopoiesis is still unknown. To investigate possible defects in cell-cycle regulation in PV, the expression of Rb and CDK inhibitor gene messenger RNAs (mRNAs) in highly purified human erythroid colony-forming cells (ECFCs) was screened using an RNase protection assay (RPA) and 11 gene probes. It was found that RNA representing exon 2 of p16(INK4a) and p14(ARF) was enhanced by 2.8- to 15.9-fold in 11 patients with PV. No increase of exon 2 mRNA was evident in the T cells of patients with PV, or in the ECFCs and T cells from patients with secondary polycythemia. p27 also had elevated mRNA expression in PV ECFCs, but to a lesser degree. Because the INK4a/ARF locus encodes 2 tumor suppressors, p16(INK4a) and p14(ARF) with the same exon 2 sequence, the increased mRNA fragment could represent either one. To clarify this, mRNA representing the unique first exons of INK4a and ARF were analyzed by semiquantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. This demonstrated that mRNAs from the first exons of both genes were increased in erythroid and granulocyte-macrophage cells and Western blot analysis showed that the INK4a protein (p16(INK4a)) was increased in PV ECFCs. Sequencing revealed no mutations of INK4a or ARF in 10 patients with PV. p16(INK4a) is an important negative cell-cycle regulator, but in contrast with a wide range of malignancies where inactivation of the INK4a gene is one of the most common carcinogenetic events, in PV p16( INK4a) expression was dramatically increased without a significant change in ECFC cell cycle compared with normal ECFCs. It is quite likely that p16(INK4a) and p14(ARF) are not the pathogenetic cause of PV, but instead represent a cellular response to an abnormality of a downstream regulator of proliferation such as cyclin D, CDK4/CDK6, Rb, or E2F. Further work to delineate the function of these genes in PV is in progress. (Blood. 2001;97:3424-3432)
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PMID:Increased expression of the INK4a/ARF locus in polycythemia vera. 1136 33