Download or read book Mechanisms of Estrogen Receptor Alpha Mediated Transcriptional Repression written by Joseph Sin and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prolonged exposure to increased levels of estrogen has been shown to increase the risk of breast cancer. In addition, estrogen has been shown to cause breast cancer cell proliferation. A common form of breast cancer treatment involved selective estrogen receptor modulation. A molecular explanation of how this works is that estrogen regulates and binds to estrogen receptor (ER), a ligand-dependent transcription factor. ER associated with estrogen induces gene transcription by translocating into the nucleus and binding to estrogen response element. ER also recruits cofactor proteins, which results in chromatin remodeling and gene expression regulation through interacting with histone acetylases or transcriptional machinery. Most studies have focused on the study of how ER can activate gene transcription. Recently, ER has been shown to also repress gene transcription. my research has two parts. The first part was to find genes that were down regulated by estrogen in order to increase the data pool of genes down-regulated by estrogen. Four target genes, ARGN, MGC16169, CALML5, and NFIB are suspected to be involved in down-regulation by ER. However, after conducting validation tests, these genes were determined to not be repressed. The second part includes characterizing the specific effects of co-repressors NCoR, NRIP1, and SMRT. Removal of these co-repressors and subsequent effect of their removal on following four ER target sites, HES1, PSCA, SLC35A1, and MME were studied. A knock down of a single co-repressor did not affect the majority of transcriptional activity in ER repressed target genes. A triple knock down was also conducted in hope that removal of multiple co-repressors might affect repression. However, the triple knock down was a failure and future experiments need to be done. Understanding the mechanisms of ER transcriptional repression would significantly aid the creation of effective treatments for breast cancer.