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Kidney cancer

An enigma remains

Nature Reviews Cancer volume 11, pages 464–465 (2011)Cite this article

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Additional experiments with bone and adipose tissues and cells indicated that WTX has a complex set of functions during development that involve regulation of the WNT pathway.

Annie Moisan, Miguel Rivera and colleagues generated a series of Wtx-conditional knockout mice to examine the precise function of WTX in vivo. Wtx-null mice (males) and heterozygous mice (females) showed gross abnormalities in the skeleton, and the null mice had striking defects in the kidneys, heart, spleen and adipose tissues: all of these tissues are derived from the embryonic mesenchyme. WTX is normally expressed in the metanephric mesenchyme, which secretes signals that are necessary for the development of the ureteric bud from the Wolffian duct and which is in turn induced to generate most renal epithelia. In the 64% of Wtx-null animals with either unilateral or bilateral renal agenesis (a complete lack of kidney development), widespread apoptosis in the metanephric mesenchyme (shown by the cleavage of caspase 3) was evident. The kidneys that did form in Wtx-null mice were often larger than normal owing to the expansion of mesenchymal progenitors, generated from embryonic mesenchyme, which is also evident in patients with Wilms' tumour. However, none of the heterozygous mice, which were viable and followed up to 80 weeks of age, developed Wilms' tumour.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Moisan, A. et al. The WTX tumor supressor regulates mesenchymal progenitor cell fate specification. Dev. Cell 20, 583–596 (2011)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Huff, V. Wilms' tumours: about tumour suppressor genes, an oncogene and a chameleon gene. Nature Rev. Cancer 11, 111–121 (2011)

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Authors
  1. Nicola McCarthy
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McCarthy, N. An enigma remains. Nat Rev Cancer 11, 464–465 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc3095

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