A gene involved in gene silencing is also a tumour suppressor that requires two functional copies to protect against cancer. Tyler Jacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his colleagues studied several mouse models of cancer in which one or both copies of Dicer1 were deleted. This gene encodes a protein that is crucial for processing fragments of RNA called microRNAs, which silence other genes.
The authors showed that deleting a single copy of Dicer1 led to more tumours, lower levels of microRNAs and reduced survival. However, full loss of Dicer1 blocked tumour formation, presumably because some level of its protein is needed for cell growth or viability.
The team also looked at data for several human cancers. A high proportion of these also had partial, but never complete, loss of the tumour suppressor.
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Cancer biology: Dicer blocker. Nature 462, 392–393 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462392f
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/462392f
