Proteins of the CAS (Crk-Associated Substrate) family (BCAR1/p130Cas, NEDD9/HEF1/Cas-L, EFS/SIN and CASS4/HEPL) are integral players in normal and pathological cell biology. CAS proteins act as scaffolds to regulate protein complexes controlling migration and chemotaxis, apoptosis, cell cycle, and differentiation, and have more recently been linked to a role in progenitor cell function. Reflecting these complex functions, over-expression of CAS proteins has now been strongly linked to poor prognosis and increased metastasis in cancer, as well as resistance to firstline chemotherapeutics in multiple tumor types including breast and lung cancers, glioblastoma, and melanoma. Further, CAS proteins have also been linked to additional pathological conditions including inflammatory disorders, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, as well as developmental defects. This review will explore the roles of the CAS proteins in normal and pathological states in the context of the many mechanistic insights into CAS protein function that have emerged in the past decade.

In the past 3 years, altered expression of the HEF1/CAS-L/ NEDD9 scaffolding protein has emerged as contributing to cancer metastasis in multiple cancer types. However, whereas some studies have identified elevated NEDD9 expression as prometastatic, other work has suggested a negative role in tumor progression. We here show that the Nedd9-null genetic background significantly limits mammary tumor initiation in the MMTV-polyoma virus middle T genetic model. Action of NEDD9 is tumor cell intrinsic, with immune cell infiltration, stroma, and angiogenesis unaffected. The majority of the late-appearing mammary tumors of MMTV-polyoma virus middle T;Nedd9 À/À mice are characterized by depressed activation of proteins including AKT, Src, FAK, and extracellular signal-regulated kinase, emphasizing an important role of NEDD9 as a scaffolding protein for these prooncogenic proteins. Analysis of cells derived from primary Nedd9 +/+ and Nedd9 À/À tumors showed persistently reduced FAK activation, attachment, and migration, consistent with a role for NEDD9 activation of FAK in promoting tumor aggressiveness. This study provides the first in vivo evidence of a role for NEDD9 in breast cancer progression and suggests that NEDD9 expression may provide a biomarker for tumor aggressiveness.

Case-control studies have been widely used to test for association between DNA sequence variants and complex diseases. The premise of genetic association studies is that the increased allele or genotype frequencies in cases compared with controls implicates sequence variants that either increase risk to a disease or are in strong linkage disequilibrium (LD) with a disease-causal mutation. However, many other factors can also lead to an observed difference in allele or genotype frequencies between cases and controls. While much attention has been devoted to the potential impact of incomparability between cases and controls in terms of sources of cases and controls, environmental exposures, and genetic background (population stratification), there is a clear lack of comprehension of the impact of genotyping error on the results of association studies. The accuracy and precision of genotyping becomes more critical in case-control studies of complex diseases because:(1) the effect of a specific risk allele under study is usually small, therefore even a low frequency of genotyping error may lead to a false positive or false negative finding; (2) no Mendelian inheritance check can be performed due to lack of family genotype data; (3) a large number of genotypes are usually generated. However, the degree of genotyping error in case-control studies remains unclear, due to the lack of direct measures of this type of error.To indirectly assess the prevalence and magnitude of genotyping error in case-control studies, we systematically reviewed reported association studies from PUBMED and performed Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) tests in control subjects for each reported single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). A significant difference between the observed and expected genotype frequencies under HWE may indicate genotyping error, because the conditions of HWE are generally applicable to the control subjects in any well-designed study population, i.e. (1) mating takes place at random with respect to genotype, (2) allelic frequencies are the same in males and females, and (3) mutation, selection, and migration are negligible. Although exceptions to the conditions of HWE may explain deviation, it is critical that investigators recognize the need to perform a test of HWE, and then evaluate the reason(s) for any observed deviation.We searched for articles with the keywords "association genotyp* genetic case control", and limited the search to articles in English, with human subjects, and 2000 publication date. The search yielded 157 articles, which we then limited to the 101 articles available among 1,721 journals received at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Coy C. Carpenter Library. We disregarded 26 articles that did not include SNPs. This search and selection scheme resulted in a total of 75 articles describing 133 SNPs (the list of these articles is at www.wfubmc.edu/genomics). It is worth noting that limiting journals to our local library could bias toward higher profile journals and our findings may not be representat...

Fatty acid synthase (FAS), the cellular enzyme that synthesizes palmitate, is expressed at high levels in tumor cells and is vital for their survival. Through the synthesis of palmitate, FAS primarily drives the synthesis of phospholipids in tumor cells.In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the FAS inhibitors induce endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress in tumor cells. Treatment of tumor cells with FAS inhibitors induces robust PERK-dependent phosphorylation of the translation initiation factor eIF2A and concomitant inhibition of protein synthesis. PERK-deficient transformed mouse embryonic fibroblasts and HT-29 colon carcinoma cells that express a dominant negative PERK (#C-PERK) are hypersensitive to FAS inhibitor-induced cell death. Pharmacologic inhibition of FAS also induces the processing of X-box binding protein-1, indicating that the IRE1 arm of the ER stress response is activated when FAS is inhibited. Induction of ER stress is further confirmed by the increased expression of the ER stress-regulated genes CHOP, ATF4, and GRP78. FAS inhibitor-induced ER stress is activated prior to the detection of caspase 3 and PARP cleavage, primary indicators of cell death, whereas orlistat-induced cell death is rescued by coincubation with the global translation inhibitor cycloheximide. Lastly, FAS inhibitors cooperate with the ER stress inducer thapsigargin to enhance tumor cell killing. These results provide the first evidence that FAS inhibitors induce ER stress and establish an important mechanistic link between FAS activity and ER function. [Cancer Res 2007;67(3):1262-9]

High levels of fatty acid synthase (FAS) expression have been observed in several cancers, including breast, prostate, colon and lung carcinoma, compared with their respective normal tissue. We present data that show high levels of FAS protein in human and rat glioma cell lines and human glioma tissue samples, as compared to normal rat astrocytes and normal human brain. Incubating glioma cells with the FAS inhibitor cerulenin decreased endogenous fatty acid synthesis by approximately 50%. Cell cycle analysis demonstrated a time-and dose-dependent increase in S-phase cell arrest following cerulenin treatment for 24 h. Further, treatment with cerulenin resulted in time-and dose-dependent decreases in glioma cell viability, as well as reduced clonogenic survival. Increased apoptotic cell death and PARP cleavage were observed in U251 and SNB-19 cells treated with cerulenin, which was independent of the death receptor pathway. Overexpressing Bcl-2 inhibited cerulenin-mediated cell death. In contrast, primary rat astrocytes appeared unaffected. Finally, RNAi-mediated knockdown of FAS leading to reduced FAS enzymatic activity was associated with decreased glioma cell viability. These findings suggest that FAS might be a novel target for antiglioma therapy.

To determine the effects of expression of mutant Ki-ras on lung tumorigenesis, we developed a bitransgenic mouse model that expresses the human Ki-ras(G12C) allele in alveolar type II and/or Clara cells in a tetracycline-inducible, lung-specific manner. Expression of Ki-ras(G12C) caused multiple, small lung tumors over a 12-month time period. Although tumor multiplicity increased upon continued Ki-ras expression, most lung lesions were hyperplasias or well-differentiated adenomas. This is in contrast to the more severe phenotypes observed in other transgenic mouse models in which different mutant Ki-ras alleles were expressed in the lung. Expression of Ki-ras(G12C) was associated with a 2-fold increase in the activation of the Ras and Ral signaling pathways and increased phosphorylation of Ras downstream effectors, including Erk, p90 ribosomal S6 kinase, ribosomal S6 protein, p38 and MAPKAPK-2. In contrast, expression of the transgene had no effect on the activation of the JNK and Akt signaling pathways. Withdrawal of doxycycline for 1 month resulted in almost a complete absence of proliferative pulmonary lesions, suggesting tumor regression in the absence of Ki-ras expression. Mutant Ki-ras(G12C) expression was sufficient for initial lung tumor transformation, required for maintenance of tumor phenotype, and induced transformation of lung epithelial cells by the activation of multiple effector pathways. These results describe a novel mouse lung tumor model demonstrating benign tumor development in the absence of tumor progression, which will provide a new tool for understanding the early stages of lung tumor pathogenesis.

The primary cilium is a well-established target in the pathogenesis of numerous developmental and chronic disorders, and more recently is attracting interest as a structure relevant to cancer. Here we discuss mechanisms by which changes in cilia can contribute to the formation and growth of tumors. We emphasize the cancer-relevance of cilia-dependent signaling pathways and proteins including mTOR, VHL, TSC, WNT, Aurora-A, NEDD9, and Hedgehog, and highlight the emerging role of ciliary dysfunction in renal cell carcinoma, medulloblastoma, and breast cancer.

Overexpression of the NEDD9/HEF1/Cas-L scaffolding protein is frequent, and drives invasion and metastasis in breast, head and neck, colorectal, melanoma, lung, and other types of cancer. We have examined the consequences of genetic ablation of Nedd9 in the MMTV-HER2/ERBB2/neu mouse mammary tumor model. Unexpectedly, we found that only a limited effect on metastasis in MMTV-neu;Nedd9−/− mice compared to MMTV-neu;Nedd9+/+ mice, but instead a dramatic reduction in tumor incidence (18% versus 80%), and a significantly increased latency until tumor appearance. Orthotopic reinjection and tail vein injection of cells arising from tumors, coupled with in vivo analysis, indicated tumors arising in MMTV-neu;Nedd9−/− mice had undergone mutational selection that overcame the initial requirement for Nedd9. To better understand the defects in early tumor growth, we compared mammary progenitor cell pools from MMTV-neu;Nedd9−/− versus MMTV-neu;Nedd9+/+ mice. The MMTV-neu;Nedd9−/− genotype selectively reduced both the number and colony-forming potential of mammary luminal epithelial progenitor cells, while not affecting basal epithelial progenitors. MMTV-neu;Nedd9−/−mammospheres had striking defects in morphology and cell polarity. All of these defects were seen predominantly in the context of the HER2/neu oncogene, and were not associated with randomization of the plane of mitotic division, but rather with depressed expression the cell attachment protein FAK, accompanied by increased sensitivity to small molecule inhibitors of FAK and SRC. Surprisingly, in spite of these significant differences, only minimal changes were observed in the gene expression profile of Nedd9−/− mice, indicating critical Nedd9-dependent differences in cell growth properties were mediated via post-transcriptional regulation of cell signaling. Coupled with emerging data indicating a role for NEDD9 in progenitor cell populations during the morphogenesis of other tissues, these results indicate a functional requirement for NEDD9 in the growth of mammary cancer progenitor cells.