@phdthesis{Murti2014,
  author    = {Murti, Krisna},
  title     = {The Role of NFATc1 in Burkitt Lymphoma and in Eµ-Myc induced B cell Lymphoma},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-106448},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2014},
  abstract  = {Burkitt lymphoma (BL) is a highly aggressive B cell malignancy. Rituximab, a humanized antibody against CD20, in a combination with chemotherapy is a current treatment of choice for B-cell lymphomas including BL. However, certain group of BL patients are resistant to Rituximab therapy. Therefore, alternative treatments targeting survival pathways of BL are needed. In BL deregulation of MYC expression, together with additional mutations, inhibits differentiation of germinal centre (GC) B cells and drives proliferation of tumor cells. Pro-apoptotic properties of MYC are counteracted through the B-cell receptor (BCR) and phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K) pathway to ensure survival of BL cells. In normal B-cells BCR triggering activates both NF-κB and NFAT-dependent survival signals. Since BL cells do not exhibit constitutive NF-κB activity, we hypothesized that anti-apoptotic NFATc1A isoform might provide a major survival signal for BL cells. We show that NFATc1 is constitutively expressed in nuclei of BL, in BL cell lines and in Eµ-Myc-induced B cell lymphoma (BCL) cells. Nuclear residence of NFATc1 in these entities depends on intracellular Ca2+ levels but is largely insensitive to cyclosporine A (CsA) treatment and therefore independent from calcineurine (CN) activity. The protein/protein interaction between the regulatory domain of NFATc1 and DNA binding domain of BCL6 likely contributes to sustained nuclear residence of NFATc1 and to the regulation of proposed NFATc1-MYC-BCL6-PRDM1 network in B-cell lymphomas. Our data revealed lack of strict correlation between the expression of six NFATc1 isoforms in different BL-related entities suggesting that both NFATc1/alphaA and -betaA isoforms provide survival functions and that NFATc1alpha/betaB and -alpha/betaC isoforms either do not possess pro-apoptotic properties in BL cells or these properties are counterbalanced. In addition, we show that in BL entities expression of NFATc1 protein is largely regulated at post-transcriptional level, including MYC dependent increase of protein stability. Functionally we show that conditional inactivation of Nfatc1 gene in Eµ-Myc mice prevents development of BCL tumors with mature B cell immunophenotype (IgD+). Loss of NFATc1 expression in BCL cells ex vivo results in apoptosis of tumor cells. Together our results identify NFATc1 as an important survival factor in BL cells and, hence, as a promising target for alternative therapeutic strategies for BL.},
  subject      = {Transkriptionsfaktor},
  language  = {en}
}