<Emphasis Type="Italic">KIRs</Emphasis> gene content diversity in Iranians with urothelial bladder cancer

Natural killer cells (NK) are the first arm of the innate immune system in defense against tumor and infection. 16 distinct Killer-cell immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIRs) are involved in orchestrating NK cell function. The KIR family contains 14 genes and 2 pseudogenes. Six of these receptors are activating (aKIR) and the remaining receptors are inhibitory KIRs (iKIR), that interact with MHC-I molecules; producing signals which stop NK cell function. In the current study, we have investigated the genomic diversity of KIRs and determining the A and B haplotypes as well as Bx subsets in 119 patients with bladder cancer and 200 healthy controls to find out if there is an association between KIR system and susceptibility to bladder cancer. Polymerase chain reaction with sequence specific primers (SSP–PCR) typing system was used to determine the KIR gene profile. The results implicated decreased frequency of inhibitory KIR2DL2 and activating KIR2DS2 while increased frequency of CxT4 genotypes in patients compared with healthy controls. Among Bx subsets, the CxT4 gene cluster is more frequent in bladder cancer patients compared to controls. Our results provide a conclusion that KIR2S2 and KIR2L2 may play a protective role against bladder cancer development while the CxT4 gene cluster may underlie susceptibility to bladder cancer in Iranian population.     

Expression of the novel human gene,UBE2Q1, in breast tumors

The novel human gene, designated ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2Q family member 1 (UBE2Q1) maps to chromosome 1q21.3. The gene has an open reading frame corresponding to 422 amino acids and contains a RWD domain and an E2 ubiquitin conjugating enzyme domain. Here, we investigated the expression levels of both mRNA and protein of UBE2Q1 gene in cancerous versus normal parts of breast specimens from 26 patients. Real-time PCR data showed that the relative expression level of UBE2Q1 mRNA was significantly greater in cancers than in non-cancerous tissues of breast specimens (Mean ± SEM, 0.064 ± 0.015 for cancers and 0.026 ± 0.01 for noncancerous tissues, P < 0.05 Mann–Whitney test). A rabbit polyclonal antibody was generated against an amino acid sequence predicted from the DNA sequence of UBE2Q1 gene. This antibody was used to perform Western blotting on 21 cases in our cohort of breast specimens. Thus, 13 (61.904%) of the cases showed an increase in the UBE2Q1 immunoreactivity in their cancerous tissues as compared with the corresponding normal tissues. This result along with the real-time PCR data shows that the novel human gene, UBE2Q1, is expressed in human breast and may have implications for pathogenesis of breast cancer.