Abstract
Mucins are high molecular weight O-glycoproteins that are predominantly expressed at the apical surface of epithelial cells and have wide range of functions. The functional diversity is attributed to their structure that comprises of a peptide chain with unique domains and multiple carbohydrate moieties added during posttranslational modifications. Tumor cells aberrantly overexpress mucins, and thereby promote proliferation, differentiation, motility, invasion and metastasis. Along with their aberrant expression, accumulating evidence suggest the critical role of altered subcellular localization of mucins under pathological conditions due to altered endocytic processes. The mislocalization of mucins and their interactions result in change in the density and activity of important cell membrane proteins (like, receptor tyrosine kinases) to facilitate various signaling, which help cancer cells to proliferate, survive and progress to more aggressive phenotype. In this review article, we summarize studies on mucins trafficking and provide a perspective on its importance to pathological conditions and to answer critical questions including its use for therapeutic interventions.
Highlights
Mucins (MUC) are high molecular weight O-glycoproteins, predominantly expressed at the apical surface of the epithelial cells [1,2,3,4]
MUC4 is not expressed in the normal pancreas, but the early pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PanINs) precursor lesions have been shown to express MUC4, which further increases as the disease progresses [4,5,6]
MUC4 is overexpressed in breast, gastric and ovarian cancer [7,8,9], and its overexpression has been associated with the poor prognosis of pancreatic cancer and cholangiocarcinoma [10, 11]
Summary
Mucins (MUC) are high molecular weight O-glycoproteins, predominantly expressed at the apical surface of the epithelial cells [1,2,3,4]. The MUC1 utilizes these pathways for endocytosis and cell surface localization [20,21,22] (Fig. 1). They found that low cytoplasmic intensity and high cell surface localization of MUC1 correlated with better prognosis of breast cancer patients and survival [36].
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