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- Aripaka, Karthik, 1986-
(author)
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Studies on the biological functions of interaction between components in Wnt, TGF-β and HIF pathways for cancer progression
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Cancer is a disease that involves aggressive changes in the genome and aberrant signals between the living cells. Signalling pathways such as TGF-β (Transforming growth factor-β), Wnt, EGF (epidermal growth factor) and HIF (Hypoxia-inducible factor) evolved to regulate growth and development in mammals. These factors are also implicated for tumorigenesis due to failure or aberrant expression of components in these pathways. Cancer progression is a multistep process, and these steps reflect genetic alterations driving the progressive transformation of healthy human cells into highly malignant derivatives. Many types of cancers are diagnosed in the human population, such as head & neck, cervical, brain, liver, colon, prostate, uterine, breast, and renal cell cancer.Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer and one of the foremost leading cancer-related deaths in men in the world. Aberrant Wnt3a signals promote cancer progression through the accumulation of β-Catenin. In the first paper, we have elucidated intriguing functions for Tumour necrosis factor receptor-associated factor 6 (TRAF6) as a coregulatory factor for the expression of Wnt-target genes which was confirmed in vivo by using CRISPR/Cas9 genomic editing, in zebrafish. Our data suggest that Wnt3a promotes TRAF6 interaction with Wnt components, and TRAF6 is required for gene expression of β-Catenin as well as for the Wnt-ligand co-receptor LRP5. From the in vivo studies, we elucidated positive regulation of TRAF6, which is crucial for survival and development of zebrafish. This study identifies TRAF6 as an evolutionary conserved co-regulatory protein in the Wnt pathway that also promotes the progression of prostate and colorectal cancer due to its positive effects on Wnt3a signalling.Hypoxia is a condition due to O2 deprivation, and Hypoxia-inducible factors (HIF) transcription factors are responsible for the maintenance of oxygen homeostasis in living cells. Irregularities in these HIF transcription factors trigger pathological cellular responses for initiation and progression of malignant cancers. Renal cell carcinoma, malignant cancer arising in renal parenchyma and renal pelvis and, hypoxia plays a vital role in its progression. In the second paper, we have investigated the clinicopathological relevance of several hypoxic and TGF-β component proteins such as HIF-1α/2α/3α, TGF-β type 1 receptor (ALK5-FL) and the intracellular domain of ALK5 (ALK5-ICD), SNAI1 and PAI-1 with patient survival in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). We showed that HIF-2α associated with low cancer-specific survival. HIF-2α and SNAI1 positively correlated with ALK5-ICD, pSMAD2/3, PAI-1 and SNAI1 with HIF-2α; HIF-1α positively correlated with pSMAD2/3. Further, under normoxic conditions, our data suggest that ALK5 interacts with HIF-1α and HIF-2α, and promotes their expression and target genes such as GLUT1 and CA9, in a VHL dependent manner through its kinase activity. These findings shed light on the critical aspect of cross-talk between TGF-β signalling and hypoxia pathway, and also the novel finding of an interaction between ALK5 and HIF-α might provide a more in-depth understanding of mechanisms behind tumour progressionIn the third paper, an ongoing study, we investigated the role of HIF-3α in the progression of Renal cell carcinoma and its association with the components of TGF-β and HIF pathways. We have observed increased levels of HIF-3α in ccRCC and pRCC (papillary renal cell carcinoma) which are associated with advanced tumour stage, metastasis and larger tumours. Also, we found HIF-3α show a significant positive association with pro-invasive gene SNAI1, which is a crucial regulator of epithelial to mesenchymal transition. TRAF6 an E3 ligase known to be a prognostic marker in RCC and we observed HIF-3α associates with TRAF6.
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- Kotova, Irina, 1972-
(author)
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Purification of general RNA polymerase II transcription factors from mouse for studies of proliferation-specific transcription
- 2003
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Accurate initiation of transcription by RNA polymerase II depends on general transcription factors (GTFs), which include the TATA-binding protein (TBP) and the transcription factors (TF) IIB, IIF, IIE and IIH. In order to reconstitute mouse transcription in vitro, we cloned the genes encoding mouse TFIIB, and both subunits of TFIIE and TFIIF from a mouse cDNA library. TBP and TFIIB were expressed in E.coli, while both subunits of TFIIE and the two subunits of TFIIF were expressed in a baculovirus system. All these factors were purified to > 90% homogeneity. The more complex transcription factors, TFIIH and RNA polymerase II, were purified more than 1000-fold and to near homogeneity, respectively, from tissue cultured mouse ascites cells. We have shown that the purified mouse transcription factors are active in a reconstituted RNA polymerase II in vitro transcription assay. The transcription reaction was inhibited by α-amanitine, and dependent on the addition of all the GTFs.Ribonucleotide reductase is a key enzyme in deoxyribonucleotide synthesis. It consists of two subunits, R1 and R2, which are both required for the enzyme activity. Transcription of the R1 and R2 genes is restiricted to the S-phase of the cell cycle, but the mechanisms that control this coordinated expression remain to be identified. We have studied initiation of transcription from the mouse R2 gene using a combination of in vivo reporter gene assays and in vitro transcription assays with crude nuclear extracts or with purified transcription factors. This promoter has an atypical TATA-box and a CCAAT-box that binds the transcription factor NF-Y.We found that a mutation in the R2 CCAAT-box had no effect on the transcription level in in vitro transcription assays reconstituted with pure transcription factors. However, it significantly decreased the level of transcription in similar experiments using crude nuclear extract. We also found that the sequence downstream from the R2 transcription start site (5´-UTR) (from +1 to +17 base pairs relative to transcription start site) is essential for initiation of transcription from this promoter. The presence of the wild type 5´-UTR made the R2 TATA-box redundant. On the other hand, the R2 5´-UTR had a repressing effect on transcription from the mouse R2 promoter. This region contains a palindrome sequence that covers 10 base pairs, and it is partially conserved in the human R2 promoter. Gel shift assays and in vitro transcription experiments using antibodies against mouse TAF4 (=TAF135) demonstrate that TAF4 is a component of the protein complex that interacts with this palindrome region, and suggest involvement of this component of the TFIID complex in negative regulation of the R2 promoter.The Adenovirus Major Late (AdML) promoter is commonly used as a model for studies of transcription initiation and regulation. It is a TATA-box dependent promoter, which also contains an initiator (Inr) element, a CCAAT-box interacting with transcription factor NF-Y, and an E-box binding the upstream stimulatory factor (USF). Using gel shift assays with recombinant NF-Y, USF, and immunopurified human TFIID, we show that binding of USF1 and NF-Y to DNA is not cooperative and that both factors independently facilitate binding of TFIID to the core promoter. The activation domains of NF-Y are expendable for this effect. Negative cofactor (NC2) comprises two subunits, which have a histone-fold structure similar to NF-Y, and represses transcription through formation of an inhibitory complex with TBP. Using an in vitro transcription system based on crude nuclear extracts, we show that NC2 has a negative effect on transcription in the presence of NF-Y or USF1, indicating that the two activators do not act as antirepressors. In vitro transcription using highly purified transcription factors efficiently reproduces repression of transcription by NC2. However, USF1 was inactive and NF-Y had a repressing effect in this system, which suggests that the activator functions of USF and NF-Y depend on cofactors.
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- Larsson, Lars, 1983-, et al.
(author)
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Decentralized Kubernetes Federation Control Plane
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This position paper presents our vision for a distributed decentralized Kubernetes federation control plane. The goal is to support federations consisting of thousands of Kubernetes clusters, in order to support next generation edge cloud use-cases. Our review of the literature and experience with the current centralized state of the art Kubernetes federation controllers shows that it is unable to scale to a sufficient size, and centralization constitutes an unacceptable single point of failure. Our proposed system maintains cluster autonomy, allows clusters to collaboratively handle error conditions, and scales to support edge cloud use-cases. Our approach is based on a shared database of conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), shared among all clusters in the federation, and algorithms that make use of the data.
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