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Updated: May 1, 2026

Studying TGF-β Signaling and TGF-β-induced Epithelial-to-mesenchymal Transition in Breast Cancer and Normal Cells
Published on: October 27, 2020
Ahnak functions as a tumor suppressor via modulation of TGFβ/Smad signaling pathway
1Department of Life Sciences and GT5 program, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.
Abstract:
We provide detailed mechanisms of Ahnak-mediated potentiation of transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) signaling, which leads to a negative regulation of cell growth. We show that Smad3 interacts with Ahnak through MH2 domain and that Ahnak stimulates Smad3 localization into nucleus leading to potentiating TGFβ-induced transcriptional activity of R-Smad. Moreover, overexpression of Ahnak resulted in growth retardation and cell cycle arrest through downregulation of c-Myc and cyclin D1/D2. We describe results from analyses of Ahnak(-/-) mouse model expressing middle T antigen in a mammary gland-specific manner (MMTV(Tg/+)Ahnak(-/-)), which showed significantly progressed hyperplasia of mammary glands compared with MMTV(Tg/+)Ahnak(+/+). Finally, we screened multiple human breast cancer tissues and showed that the expression of Ahnak in cancer tissues is lower than that in control tissues by 50%. Taken together, these data indicate that Ahnak mediates a negative regulation of cell growth and acts as novel tumor suppressor through potentiation of TGFβ signaling.
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