Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹National Centre for Bioinformatics, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan; ²Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Pathologisches Institut der LMU, Thalkirchner Str. 36, D-80337 Munchen Germany; ³Department of BioSciences, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Park Road Chak Shahzad Islamabad Pakistan;

Email

sajid@qau.edu.pk; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received November 05, 2011; Accepted November 16, 2011; Published December 10, 2011

In human, WNT gene clusters are highly conserved at specie level and associated with carcinogenesis. Among them, WNT-10A and WNT-6 genes clustered in chromosome 2q35 are homologous to WNT-10B and WNT-1 located in chromosome 12q13, respectively. In an attempt to study co-regulation, the coordinated expression of these genes was monitored in human breast cancer tissues. As compared to normal tissue, both WNT-10A and WNT-10B genes exhibited lower expression while WNT-6 and WNT-1 showed increased expression in breast cancer tissues. The co-expression pattern was elaborated by detailed phylogenetic and syntenic analyses. Moreover, the intergenic and intragenic regions for these gene clusters were analyzed for studying the transcriptional regulation. In this context, adequate conserved binding sites for SOX and TCF family of transcriptional factors were observed. We propose that SOX9 and TCF4 may compete for binding at the promoters of WNT family genes thus regulating the disease phenotype.

Keywords

WNT, breast cancer, TCF, SOX.

Citation

Ain et al. Bioinformation 7(7): 339-346 (2011)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.