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Mol. Cell. Biol., Jan 1997, 495-505, Vol 17, No. 1
U Thorsteinsdottir, G Sauvageau, MR Hough, W Dragowska, PM Lansdorp, HJ Lawrence, C Largman and RK Humphries
Multiple members of the A, B, and C clusters of Hox genes are expressed in
hematopoietic cells. Several of these Hox genes have been found to display
distinctive expression patterns, with genes located at the 3' side of the
clusters being expressed at their highest levels in the most primitive
subpopulation of human CD34+ bone marrow cells and genes located at the 5'
end having a broader range of expression, with downregulation at later
stages of hematopoietic differentiation. To explore if these patterns
reflect different functional activities, we have retrovirally engineered
the overexpression of a 5'-located gene, HOXA10, in murine bone marrow
cells and demonstrate effects strikingly different from those induced by
overexpression of a 3'-located gene, HOXB4. In contrast to HOXB4, which
causes selective expansion of primitive hematopoietic cells without
altering their differentiation, overexpression of HOXA10 profoundly
perturbed myeloid and B-lymphoid differentiation. The bone marrow of mice
reconstituted with HOXA10- transduced bone marrow cells contained in high
frequency a unique progenitor cell with megakaryocytic colony-forming
ability and was virtually devoid of unilineage macrophage and
pre-B-lymphoid progenitor cells derived from the transduced cells.
Moreover, and again in contrast to HOXB4, a significant proportion of
HOXA10 mice developed a transplantable acute myeloid leukemia with a
latency of 19 to 50 weeks. These results thus add to recognition of Hox
genes as important regulators of hematopoiesis and provide important new
evidence of Hox gene-specific functions that may correlate with their
normal expression pattern.
Copyright © 1997, American Society for Microbiology
Overexpression of HOXA10 in murine hematopoietic cells perturbs both myeloid and lymphoid differentiation and leads to acute myeloid leukemia
Terry Fox Laboratory, British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, Canada.
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