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  • Oncogenomics
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FRMD3, a novel putative tumour suppressor in NSCLC

Abstract

Lung cancer including non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) represents a leading cause of cancer death in Western countries. Yet, understanding its pathobiology to improve early diagnosis and therapeutic strategies is still a major challenge of today's biomedical research. We analyzed a set of differentially regulated genes that were identified in skin cancer by a comprehensive microarray study, for their expression in NSCLC. We found that ferm domain containing protein 3 (FRMD3), a member of the protein 4.1 superfamily, is expressed in normal lung tissue but silenced in 54 out of 58 independent primary NSCLC tumours compared to patient-matched normal lung tissue. FRMD3 overexpression in different epithelial cell lines resulted in a decreased clonogenicity as measured by colony formation assay. Although cell attachment capabilities and cell proliferation rate remained unchanged, this phenotype was most likely owing to induced apoptosis. Our data identify FRMD3 as a novel putative tumour suppressor gene suggesting an important role in the origin and progression of lung cancer.

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Abbreviations

AC:

adenocarcinoma

CFA:

colony formation assay

DAL-1:

differentially expressed in carcinoma of the lung 1

FRMD3:

ferm domain containing protein 3

NSCLC:

non small cell lung carcinoma

pSCC:

pulmonary squamous cell carcinoma

sqRT–PCR:

semiquantitative RT–PCR

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Dr Marina Schorpp-Kistner for helpful discussion about the manuscript and associated work. We thank Dr Irena Crnković-Mertens for help with preparing the RNAs of some of the N/T-samples. NSCLC tissues were obtained according to the ethic votum 270/2001, version 2.0 (23 January 2005).

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Correspondence to B Hartenstein.

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Supplementary Information accompanies the paper on the Oncogene website (http://www.nature.com/onc).

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Haase, D., Meister, M., Muley, T. et al. FRMD3, a novel putative tumour suppressor in NSCLC. Oncogene 26, 4464–4468 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.onc.1210225

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