Why mice don’t get cancer of the retina

The study, published today in the open access journal BMC Biology, explains why humans with a defective copy of the Retinoblastoma gene RB1 are at high risk of developing cancer of the retina, or retinoblastoma, whereas mice with a similar genetic profile do not develop the cancer.

Stacy Donovan and Brett Schweers from St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, USA and colleagues from St Jude’s and from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, studied the expression of the Retinoblastoma proteins Rb (RB1 in humans), p107 and p130 throughout the development of mouse and human retinae, using molecular amplification and immunolabelling techniques.

Donovan et al. find that p107, Rb and p130 are expressed at different stages in the developing mouse retina, with p107 expressed first and Rb and 130 expressed during the late stages of development. The authors show that, in mutant mouse embryos that do not express Rb at all, the levels of p107 are much higher than in wild-type embryos at the same stage in development. The reverse situation is observed in mutant embryos that do not express p107. This suggests that Rb and p107 compensate for each other in retinal progenitor cells and prevent the deregulated proliferation of the cells that leads to retinoblastoma. By contrast, RB1 is the main protein expressed during retinal development in humans. The protein p107 is only slightly expressed during development and cannot compensate for the lack of RB1, which leads to retinoblastoma.

Media Contact

Juliette Savin alfa

More Information:

http://www.biomedcentral.com

All latest news from the category: Life Sciences and Chemistry

Articles and reports from the Life Sciences and chemistry area deal with applied and basic research into modern biology, chemistry and human medicine.

Valuable information can be found on a range of life sciences fields including bacteriology, biochemistry, bionics, bioinformatics, biophysics, biotechnology, genetics, geobotany, human biology, marine biology, microbiology, molecular biology, cellular biology, zoology, bioinorganic chemistry, microchemistry and environmental chemistry.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

First-of-its-kind study uses remote sensing to monitor plastic debris in rivers and lakes

Remote sensing creates a cost-effective solution to monitoring plastic pollution. A first-of-its-kind study from researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities shows how remote sensing can help monitor and…

Laser-based artificial neuron mimics nerve cell functions at lightning speed

With a processing speed a billion times faster than nature, chip-based laser neuron could help advance AI tasks such as pattern recognition and sequence prediction. Researchers have developed a laser-based…

Optimising the processing of plastic waste

Just one look in the yellow bin reveals a colourful jumble of different types of plastic. However, the purer and more uniform plastic waste is, the easier it is to…