Gene expression profile of the NF-κB subunit p52 in Hodgkin’s lymphoma

Malignant cells of Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL) cells are characterized by constitutive activation of the canonical as well as the non-canonical NF-κB signaling cascades. Knockdown of a subunit combination corresponding to the non-canonical NF-κB dimer (p52/RelB) in the HL cell line L-1236 caused up-regulation of a set of genes that are associated with hematopoietic and lymphoid organ development. As p52 can form homodimeric complexes, which can repress transcription either alone or in association with transcriptional repressors such as HDAC1, we knocked down p52 alone to analyze its role in gene repression in HL cells. We found that the single knockdown of p52 is indeed sufficient to up-regulate an interesting set of genes that may play a role in B-cell and/or HL development. The knockdown of the NF-κB subunit p52 was carried out in L-1236 cells. Two distinct siRNA sequences against NFKB2 and two non-targeting siRNA sequences (control) were used. Experiments were performed in biological triplicates.