Molecular mechanisms of self-renewal of hepatic stem/progenitor cells during liver development and hepatic tumorigenesis

为了阐明与肝干/祖细胞自我更新有关的肝脏肿瘤发生的分子机制，我们尝试寻找与肝干细胞自我更新有关的聚梳组蛋白Ring1的下游靶基因。通过基因芯片和芯片-聚合酶链式反应分析，我们提取了CDKN2a作为Ring1b的目的基因。我们研究了CDKN2a和Ring1b缺陷小鼠在肝发生过程中肝干/祖细胞的增殖情况，结果表明挽救是有限的。我们的结论是，Ring1b在干细胞/祖细胞中除了CDKN2a之外，还应该有其他重要的下游靶点。

To elucidate the molecular mechanism of hepatic tumorigenesis, which is considered to related to the self-renewal of hepatic stem/progenitor cell, we attempted to identify the downstream target genes of Polycomb group protein Ring1 that is essential for self-renewal of hepatic stem cells. By microarray and ChIP-PCR analysis, we extracted Cdkn2a as a Ring1B target gene. We investigated the expansion of hepatic stem/progenitor cell during hepatogenesis in cdkn2a and ring1B deficient mice, the result showed that the rescue is limited. We concluded that Ring1B should have other important downstream targets in addition to Cdkn2a in stem/progenitor cells.