Roles of Bone Morphogenetic Protein Signal Transduction in Prostate Carcinogenesis

摘要

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), a family of growth factors, play diverse roles in cell proliferation and survival. In order to investigate the signal transduction of BMPs in prostate carcinogenesis, we designed a strategy to express a constitutively active BMP receptor Alk3 and a downstream signaling protein SMAD1 as well as a dominant negative BMP receptor Alk3 in prostate epithelial cells driven by a rat probasin promoter. By simply comparing the prostate weights of transgenic males with non-transgenic males and prostate histology, we did not detect any significant differences among these different groups at different ages. We have further crossed these transgenic lines with a strain of mice with prostate cancer (TRAMP). By this approach, we are unable to observe obvious influence of Alk3 and Smad transgenes in the progression of prostate cancer of the TRAMP mice. Therefore, our conclusion is that alteration in BMP signaling in transgenic mice with this strategy fails to reveal a possible role of BMP signaling in prostate carcinogenesis.