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Silencing PinX1 Compromises Telomere Length Maintenance As Well As Tumorigenicity in Telomerase-Positive Human Cancer Cells

¹ Laboratory of Tumor and Molecular Biology, Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, ² Department of Urology, General Hospital of People's Liberation Army, Beijing, P.R. China; ³ Department of Neurology, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, P.R. China; and ⁴ Stanley Ho Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, Li Ka-Shing Medical Institute, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, P.R. China

Requests for reprints: Jun Jian Huang, Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, 27 Taiping Road, Hai Dian District, Beijing, 100850 China. Phone: 86-10-6693-1323; Fax: 86-10-6824-8045; E-mail: huangjun_j{at}yahoo.com.

The nucleolar protein PinX1 has been proposed to be a putative tumor suppressor due to its binding to and inhibition of the catalytic activity of telomerase, an enzyme that is highly expressed in most human cancers in which it counteracts telomere shortening–induced senescence to confer cancer cell immortalization. However, the role of PinX1 in telomere regulation, as well as in cancer, is still poorly understood. In this study, we showed that the PinX1 protein is constitutively expressed in various human cells regardless of their telomerase activity and malignant status. Most interestingly, we found that silencing PinX1 expression by a potent short hairpin RNA construct led to a robust telomere length shortening and growth inhibition in telomerase-positive but not in telomerase-negative human cancer cells. We further showed that silencing PinX1 significantly reduced the endogenous association of telomerase with the Pot1-containing telomeric protein complex, and therefore, could account for the phenotypic telomere shortening in the affected telomerase-positive cancer cells. Our results thus reveal a novel positive role for PinX1 in telomerase/telomere regulations and suggest that the constitutive expression of PinX1 attributes to telomere maintenance by telomerase and tumorigenicity in cancer cells. [Cancer Res 2009;69(1):75–83]