Identification of novel estrogen receptor α target gene and its function in endometrial cancer

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Significant progress has been made in understanding the role of ERα as a transcription factor that regulates the expression of target genes by directly binding to an estrogen response element or by association with other transcription factors on promoter targets. Until recently, however, little had been known about the distribution of ERα-binding sites within the genome and the identity of genes regulated by these cis-acting elements. Our aims were to determine the nature of ERα binding relative to the structure of a gene and increase our understanding of ERα action in Ishikawa endometrial cancer cell line.Here, we used ChIP cloning technique and identified 47 ERα target loci in Ishikawa cells. The great majority of the binding sites were located in either introns or far distant to coding regions of genes. Among estradiol-induced genes, GRIP1 was found to increase cell survival by significantly reducing apoptosis in Ishikawa cells.Our findings suggest that at least a subset of these genes may play important biological roles in endometrial cancer.