MEF promotes stemness in the pathogenesis of gliomas

By E. Bazzoli, T. Pulvirenti, Moritz C. Oberstadt, F. Perna, Boyoung Wee, N. Schultz, Jason T. Huse, Elena I. Fomchenko, Francesca Voza, Viviane Tabar and 5 more. 2012

779 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary High-grade gliomas are aggressive and uniformly fatal tumors, composed of a heterogeneous population of cells that include many with stem cell-like properties. The acquisition of stem-like traits might contribute to glioma initiation, growth and recurrence. Here we investigated the role of the transcription factor myeloid Elf-1 like factor (MEF, also known as ELF4) in glioma. We found that MEF is highly expressed in both human and mouse GBMs and its absence impairs gliomagenesis in a PDGF-driven glioma mouse model. We show that modulation of MEF levels in both mouse neural stem cells and human glioblastoma cells, has a significant impact on neurosphere formation. Moreover, we identify Sox2 as a direct downstream target of MEF. Taken together, our studies implicate MEF as a previously unrecognized gatekeeper gene in gliomagenesis by promoting stem cell characteristics through Sox2 activation.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology, Pathology and Forensic Medicine

Citations in the corpus

• Single-Cell Mass Cytometry of Differential Immune and Drug Responses Across a Human Hematopoietic Continuum (2011, neutral): “Technological developments in flow cytometry and cell sorting [the introduction of new fluorophores, such as quantum dots (3)] have paralleled appreciation of the compartmentalization of function in the hematopoietic system and contributed to diverse fields, including immunology, stem cells (4, 5), ”