Endocrine Abstracts

MicroRNA (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNA molecules that significantly impacted the understanding of cell biology in the last decade. They regulate the expression of 10–30% of all protein-coding gene, thus playing a crucial role in a wide range of biological and pathological processes. Consistently, aberrant miRNA expression has been implicated in numerous human diseases, including pituitary tumours. Different studies analysed the entire miRNA transcriptoma, by microarra...

HMGA2 gene amplification and overexpression in human prolactinomas and development of pituitary adenomas in HMGA-transgenic mice showed that HMGA proteins play a crucial role in pituitary tumorigenesis. Recently, we have explored the pRB/E2F1 pathway to investigate the mechanism by which HMGA proteins act, showing that HMGA2 interacts with pRB and induces E2F1 activity in mouse pituitary adenomas by displacing HDAC1 from the pRB/E2F1 complex – a process that result...

Thyroid cancer is one of the most frequent malignancies of the endocrine system, and its incidence is predicted to become the fourth leading cancer diagnosis by 2030. Among thyroid carcinomas, anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) is the most aggressive and lethal tumor, which grows very rapidly, invades adjacent tissues and metastasizes, causing death in 1 year from diagnosis. We recently showed that in thyroid cancer PATZ1 expression is downregulated compared to normal thyroid and...

PATZ1 is a recently discovered zinc finger protein that, due to the presence of the POZ domain, acts as a transcriptional repressor affecting the basal activity of different promoters, and associates with a variety of transcription factors (i.e. RNF4, HMGA1, gscl, SPBP). We have previously described, by using mice lacking the PATZ1 gene, its crucial role in spermatogenesis. Consistently, PATZ1-KO mice are unfertile and testes from these mice showed only few spermatocyte...

PATZ1, a member of the POZ-ZF protein family of transcription factors is emerging as an important cancer-associated factor that can act either as oncogene or tumour-suppressor depending on the cellular context. Consistent with a tumour-suppressor role in thyroid cells, we have shown that PATZ1 is highly downregulated in anaplastic thyroid carcinomas compared to normal thyroid tissue and is a powerful inhibitor of anaplastic thyroid cancer cell survival, migration, invasiveness...