Neural cell adhesion molecule 1 (NCAM1; CD56) promotes leukemogenesis and confers drug resistance in acute myeloid leukemia.

Neural cell adhesion molecule 1 (NCAM1; also known as CD56) is expressed in up to 20% of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients. Expression of NCAM1 is widely used as a marker of minimal residual disease; however, the biological function of this cell surface protein in AML remains elusive. In this study we investigated the impact of aberrant NCAM1 expression on leukemogenesis, drug resistance and its role as a biomarker to guide therapy.Gene expression profiling was performed with RNA-seq in three cell lines (SKM-1, NOMO-1, MOLM-14) after doxycycline-mediated induction of scrambled shRNA or shNCAM1 at timepoint 72 hours. mRNA profiles of cell lines SKM-1, NOMO-1, MOLM-14 transfected either with scrambled shRNA or shRNA-NCAM1 were generated using TruSeq RNA Library Prep Kit v2 (Illumina) followed by sequencing with 100 bp paired-end reads on HiSeq 2000.