α-Catenin Inhibits β-Catenin Signaling by Preventing Formation of a β-Catenin·T-cell Factor·DNA Complex*

By A. Giannini, M. Vivanco, R. Kypta. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2000

88 citations recorded by the source corpus.

α-Catenin and β-catenin link cadherins to the cytoskeleton at adherens junctions. β-Catenin also associates with members of the T-cell factor (Tcf) family of transcription factors, and mutations in β-catenin lead to activation of Tcf-dependent transcription and increased cell growth. Although the loss of α-catenin expression can also promote cell growth, the role of endogenous α-catenin in β-catenin signaling is unclear. Here we show that loss of α-catenin expression in a colon cancer cell line correlates with increased Tcf-dependent transcription. The presence of α-catenin in colon cancer cell nuclei suggests that it inhibits transcription directly, and, in agreement with this, ectopic expression of α-catenin in the nucleus represses Tcf-dependent transcription. Furthermore, recombinant α-catenin disrupts the interaction between the β-catenin·Tcf complex and DNA. We conclude that α-catenin inhibits β-catenin signaling in the nucleus by interfering with the formation of a β-catenin·Tcf·DNA complex.

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b943c0ff0695c4bd69af2739a4a73e818617e7b

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In Molecular Biology

1. K. Willert
2. K. Jones

Citations in the corpus

• Wnt signaling: is the party in the nucleus? (2006, background): “Other central Wnt regulators that are known to translocate in and out of the nucleus include Dsh (for review, see Habas and Dawid 2005), -catenin (Giannini et al. 2000), ICAT (Tago et al. 2000), and the regulatory kinases CK1, CK2, and GSK3 .”