Runx transcriptional program for control of cell adhesion and survival. Mus musculus

The Runx genes are important in development and cancer, where they can act either as oncogenes or tumour supressors. We compared the effects of ectopic Runx expression in established fibroblasts, where all three genes produce an indistinguishable phenotype entailing epithelioid morphology and increased cell survival under stress conditions. Gene array analysis revealed a strongly overlapping transcriptional signature, with no examples of opposing regulation of the same target gene. A common set of 50 highly regulated genes was identified after further filtering on regulation by inducible RUNX1-ER. This set revealed a strong bias toward genes with annotated roles in cancer and development, and a preponderance of targets encoding extracellular or surface proteins reflecting the marked effects of Runx on cell adhesion. Keywords: Comparative study of gene targets regulated by overexpression of the different Runx family members Overall design: 6 samples (expression of different Runx family members); 5 in duplicate, 1 single. 2 control samples (empty vector) in duplicate. Cultures of Runx expressing cells were grown to confluence, treated with ethanol +/- 4OHT tamoxifen for 24 hours and harvested for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix microarrays