Sir,
We read with great interest the paper by Bao et al (2014) entitled ‘COUP-TFII regulates metastasis of colorectal adenocarcinoma cells by modulating Snail1’, showing upregulation of Snail and downregulation of E-cadherin in the human epithelial intestinal cell line HIEC overexpressing COUP-TFII upon transfection (Bao et al, 2014; Figure 5) and converse effects in COUP-TFII-KO loVo cells (Bao et al, 2014; Figure 4). We previously explored the role of COUP-TFII as a regulator of E-cadherin expression because we also had noticed a correlation between abnormally high expression of COUP-TFII and lack of E-cadherin in a large panel of carcinoma cell lines of various origins including 22 colon cancer cell lines. We transfected several cell lines with an inducible COUP-TFII expression vector and, as shown in Figure 1, did not observe a pronounced effect on E-cadherin expression. In the human colon carcinoma line HCT116 in particular, E-cadherin remained perfectly stable. HCT116 cells are not invasive in Matrigel assays and invasion was not induced by COUP-TFII. Importantly, in the lung carcinoma line A549 that is invasive straightaway, E-cadherin expression was moderately increased together with, as previously reported (Navab et al, 2004), the invasion capacity of the cells. We also extinguished COUP-TFII expression in E-cadherin-negative cell lines (SW800, MDA-MB 231) using RNA interference and saw no E-cadherin switch-on. Together with the data from Bao et al, this shows that the effect of COUP-TFII is highly dependent on the cellular context. This is actually not very surprising since transcriptional regulation by COUP-TFII is quite complex, involving dimerisation and recruitment of cofactors, and can encompass not only activation but also direct and indirect repression (Park et al, 2003).
References
Bao Y, Gu D, Feng W, Sun X, Wang X, Zhang X, Shi Q, Cui G, Yu H, Tang C, Deng A (2014) COUP-TFII regulates metastasis of colorectal adenocarcinoma cells by modulating Snail1. Br J Cancer 111: 933–943.
Navab R, Gonzalez-Santos JM, Johnston MR, Liu J, Brodt P, Tsao MS, Hu J (2004) Expression of chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor II enhances invasiveness of human lung carcinoma cells. Cancer Res 64: 5097–5105.
Park JI, Tsai SY, Tsai MJ (2003) Molecular mechanism of chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor (COUP-TF) actions. Keio J Med 52: 174–181.
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Bringuier, PP., Giroldi, L. Comment on: ‘COUP-TFII regulates metastasis of colorectal adenocarcinoma cells by modulating Snail1’. Br J Cancer 112, 1836 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/bjc.2014.613
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/bjc.2014.613