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Primary Cilia

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Loss of primary cilia occurs early in breast cancer development
Background
Primary cilia are microtubule-based organelles that resemble hair-like projections, which extend from the plasma membrane on many types of normal eukaryotic cells. These eukaryotic cells with primary cilia exhibit a non-motile single cilium. The structure of the cilia comprises of a basal body that is anchored into the plasma membrane to nucleate microtubules. Intraflagellar transport (IFT) regulates ciliogenesis, or ciliary assembly, as well as ciliary sensory functions. IFT allows the organelle to regulate critical signaling transduction pathways, such as the Hedgehog pathway. The presence or absence of cilia may regulate Hedgehog targeted drugs. The role that primary cilia play in cancer has now begun to be more thoroughly investigated in several human cancers, such as melanoma, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and ovarian cancer. All of these cancers have presented a general loss of cilia and this suggests that the loss of cilia promotes cancer development in some tissues. Studies with a small number of human breast cancer tissue samples have shown that primary cilia are lost. This experiment is aimed at expanding these results and examining primary cilia frequency in a larger, more comprehensive breast cancer cohort, including …show more content…

Several proteins have been thought to have a part in regulating AURA activity and/or expression, such as CHFR. There are no previous reports on the localization of this protein to primary cilia, but it is believed that CHFR may function at the cilium to encourage cilia stability through inactivation of AURA. Knockdown of AURA by siRNA has also led to the proposal that tubulin deacetylase(s) is not the main target for AURA-induced ciliary disassembly or inhibition of ciliary assembly in OSE

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