Nature 386, 796 - 804 (24 April 1997); doi:10.1038/386796a0

Phenotype of mice lacking functional Deleted in colorectal cancer (Dec) gene

Amin Fazeli^*, Stephanie L. Dickinson^*, Michelle L. Hermiston^†, Robert V. Tighe^*, Robert G. Steen^‡, Clayton G. Small^*, Esther T. Stoeckli^§, Kazuko Keino-Masu^§, Masayuki Masu^§, Helen Rayburn^¶, Jonathan Simons^£, Roderick T. Bronson, Jeffrey I. Gordon^†, Marc Tessier-Lavigne^§ & Robert A. Weinberg^*

^*Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA
^†Department of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri 63110, USA
^‡Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Whitehead Institute Genome Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA
^§Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Anatomy, Programs in Cell Biology, Developmental Biology and Neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143, USA
National Defense Medical College, Department of Physiology, Saitama, 359, Japan
^¶Center for Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
^£Brady Urological Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21207, USA
Department of Pathology, Tufts University Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts 02111, USA

The DCC (Deleted in colorectal cancer) gene was first identified as a candidate for a tumour-suppressor gene on human chromosome 18q. More recently, in vitro studies in rodents have provided evidence that DCC might function as a receptor for the axonal chemoattractant netrin-1. Inactivation of the murine Dcc gene caused defects in axonal projections that are similar to those observed in netrin-1-deficient mice but did not affect growth, differentiation, morphogenesis or tumorigenesis in mouse intestine. These observations fail to support a tumour-suppressor function for Dcc, but are consistent with the hypothesis that DCC is a component of a receptor for netrin-1.

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