Tumor suppressor protein p53 negatively regulates human pregnane X receptor activity

The human pregnane X receptor (PXR) regulates genes involved in drug metabolism and disposition. PXR associates with multiple corepressors that attenuate and coactivators that enhance its activity. PXR plays a vital role in the drug metabolism pathway, and a comprehensive examination of PXR-associated proteins will provide greater insight into the regulation of the receptor and possible therapeutic implications. We performed a mass spectrometric screen to identify PXR-associated proteins. Here we report that the tumor suppressor protein p53 can associate with PXR and downregulate its activity. A loss-of-function p53 mutant (R175H) interacts with PXR but does not repress its activity. Mutant p53 can relieve the suppressive effect of wild-type p53 by competing with its interaction with PXR, suggesting that protein-protein interaction is required but not sufficient for p53 to repress PXR activity. Interestingly, a PXR variant with a naturally occurring deletion of a conserved, unique sequence in the ligand binding domain (PXR174-210) did not interact with p53, indicating that the PXR-p53 interaction is specific. Using a chromatin immunoprecipitation assay, we showed that p53 inhibits the binding of PXR to the CYP3A4 promoter. The loss of p53 function in tumor cells leads to aberrant cell proliferation, apoptosis, carcinogenesis, and altered sensitivity to chemotherapeutic drugs, whereas PXR contributes to chemoresistance in many cancer cells. Our findings show for the first time that wild-type p53 can negatively regulate PXR by physically associating with it. Thus, PXR and p53 appear to play important yet opposing roles in the sensitivity of tumor cells to chemotherapy.