Monday, February 21, 2011

What Causes Cervical Cancer?

We recently read a paper published in the Journal of Virology that talks about a protein, the E6 a viral oncoprotein that has a PDZ binding motif, and is believed to be produced by strains of HPV (Human Papillomavirus) that causes cervical cancer (that's a lot of information in one sentence!). PDZ is the acronym for an exceptionally complicated term, with a relatively simple purpose: it holds together transmembrane proteins and the cytoskeleton (from what I can understand).

So the paper we studied the effects of the E6 protein in cervical cancer. Here's how that works:
The experiment tried to study the effects of E6 proteins on MAGI proteins, which are associated with the formation of tight junctions.  Tight junctions are basically one of the factors responsible for holding two cells together, and allowing them to communicate with each other. E6 disrupts the functions of MAGI proteins, which disrupts the fuction of tight junction. Because of this, cells can no longer tell whether they should divide or not (since they no longer know if there's a cell next to them), which leads to unregulated growth of cells.

The researchers started with infecting HeLa and CaSKI (2 kinds of cell lines) cells with HPV. They then knocked down E6 in some cells, and left the cells for a period of 72 hours, after which they came back to check the effects that the E6 had on the cells that still contained the oncoprotein.What they discovered was remarkable: the cell components (including MAGI-1) that had E6 bound to it were getting destroyed, whereas the ones without E6 were functioning normally.

This, in my opinion, is quite a significant discovery in cervical cancer research. Since we've managed to figure out one of the causes of the problem, we're one step closer to finding a solution for it. But science still has a long way to go before we figure out better treatment methods to cervical cancer.


Link to paper: http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/full/85/4/1757

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