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Author Notes:

Paul A. Wade: wadep2@niehs.nih.gov

A.Y. Lai and M. Fatemi contributed equally to this paper.

We gratefully acknowledge the members of the Wade, Archer, and Adelman laboratories for many useful discussions and comments in the course of this work. This manuscript was substantially improved by critical comments from Trevor Archer, Tom Eling, and Harriet Kinyamu. We also thank Drs. Jeff Tucker, Daniel Gilchrist, Scott Norton, Kevin Gerrish, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences microarray facility for their assistance in MIRA-chip experiments.

The authors have no conflicting financial interests.

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Research Funding:

This work was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health (Project number Z01ES101965 to P.A. Wade, Project number Z01ES101765 to L. Li) and by grants from the National Institutes of Health (DK60647 to D.L. Jaye). D. Mav and R. Shah were supported in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Delivery Order Number HHSN291200555547C, GSA Contract Number GS-00F-003L.

Keywords:

  • Science & Technology
  • Life Sciences & Biomedicine
  • Immunology
  • Medicine, Research & Experimental
  • Research & Experimental Medicine
  • ENHANCER-BLOCKING ACTIVITY
  • GENE-EXPRESSION
  • HUMAN GENOME
  • TRANSCRIPTIONAL REPRESSOR
  • MAMMALIAN DEVELOPMENT
  • DOWN-REGULATION
  • UP-REGULATION
  • X-CHROMOSOME
  • PROTEIN CTCF
  • CANCER-CELLS

DNA methylation prevents CTCF-mediated silencing of the oncogene BCL6 in B cell lymphomas

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Journal Title:

Journal of Experimental Medicine

Volume:

Volume 207, Number 9

Publisher:

, Pages 1939-1950

Type of Work:

Article | Final Publisher PDF

Abstract:

Aberrant DNA methylation commonly occurs in cancer cells where it has been implicated in the epigenetic silencing of tumor suppressor genes. Additional roles for DNA methylation, such as transcriptional activation, have been predicted but have yet to be clearly demonstrated. The BCL6 oncogene is implicated in the pathogenesis of germinal center-derived B cell lymphomas. We demonstrate that the intragenic CpG islands within the first intron of the human BCL6 locus were hypermethylated in lymphoma cells that expressed high amounts of BCL6 messenger RNA (mRNA). Inhibition of DNA methyltransferases decreased BCL6 mRNA abundance, suggesting a role for these methylated CpGs in positively regulating BCL6 transcription. The enhancer-blocking transcription factor CTCF bound to this intronic region in a methylation-sensitive manner. Depletion of CTCF by short hairpin RNA in neoplastic plasma cells that do not express BCL6 resulted in up-regulation of BCL6 transcription. These data indicate that BCL6 expression is maintained during lymphomagenesis in part through DNA methylation that prevents CTCF-mediated silencing.

Copyright information:

© 2010 by the Rockefeller University Press

This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

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