Conserved POU/OCT- and GATA-binding sites in 5'-flanking promoter region of mammalian WNT8B orthologs

Abstract

WNT family members are secreted-type glycoproteins regulating cell fate, planar cell polarity, cell adhesion, and cell movement. WNT signals are context-dependently transduced to the canonical pathway for the transcriptional up-regulation of MYC, CCND1, FGF20, JAG1, WISP1 and DKK1 genes, and also to the non-canonical pathway for the activation of RHOA, JNK, PKC, NFAT and NLK signaling cascades. We cloned and characterized the wild-type human WNT8B, while another group the aberrant human WNT8B with Gly230Ala and Arg284Leu amino-acid substitutions. Although WNT8B is undetectable in normal adult tissues by using Northern blot analyses, WNT8B is expressed in gastric cancer, pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and embryonal tumors. Here, comparative integromics on WNT8B orthologs were investigated by using bioinformatics (Techint) and human intelligence (Humint). Cow Wnt8b gene was identified within NW_001494361.1 genome sequence. Predicted sequence XM_582222.3 was an artificial cow Wnt8b with aberrant prediction for the first exon. Cow Wnt8b complete coding sequence was found to encode a 350-amino-acid protein, which showed 96.9% total-amino-acid identity with human WNT8B. Comparative proteomics revealed that N-terminal signal peptide, 22 Cys residues, two Asn-linked glycosylation sites, Gly230, and Arg284 of human WNT8B were conserved among mammalian WNT8B orthologs. Comparative genomics revealed that POU/OCT- and GATA-binding sites in the 5'-flanking promoter region were conserved among human, chimpanzee, cow, mouse, and rat WNT8B orthologs. In silico expression analyses revealed that human WNT8B was expressed in embryoid body derived from embryonic stem (ES) cells, hepatocyte progenitors derived from ES cells, fetal brain, diffuse-type gastric cancer, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, and ovarian fibrotheoma. Based on the expression profiles of POU and GATA family transcription factors, it was revealed that WNT8B expression in hepatocyte progenitors derived from human ES cells is due to POU5F1 (OCT3/OCT4) and GATA3, and also that WNT8B expression in diffuse-type gastric cancer is due to POU5F1 and GATA6.