Potential new way to suppress tumor growth discovered
Writing in this week’s online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Willis X. Li, PhD, a professor in the Department of Medicine at UC San Diego, reports that a particular form of a signaling protein called STAT5A stabilizes the formation of heterochromatin (a form of chromosomal DNA), which in turn suppresses the ability of cancer cells to issue instructions to multiply and grow. Specifically, Li and colleagues found that the unphosphorylated form of STAT promotes and stabilizes heterochromatin, which keeps DNA tightly packaged and inaccessible to transcription factors. …