Abstract
Estrogens are associated with a variety of diseases and play important roles in tumor development and progression. Centrosome defects are hallmarks of human cancers and contribute to ongoing chromosome missegragation and aneuploidy that manifest in genomic instability and tumor progression. Although several mechanisms underlie the etiology of centrosome aberrations in human cancer, upstream regulators are hardly known. Accumulating experimental and clinical evidence points to an important role of estrogens in deregulating centrosome homeostasis and promoting karyotype instability. Here, we will summarize existing literature of how natural and synthetic estrogens might contribute to structural and numerical centrosome defects, genomic instability and human carcinogenesis.
Highlights
Centrosomes are evolutionarily conserved organelles that serve as main microtubuleorganizing centers (MTOCs) of animal cells with a key role in mitotic spindle organization, faithful chromosome segregation, cell polarity, adhesion, motility, migration, and cilia formation
At the onset of mitosis, Plk1 displaces the ninein-like protein Nlp from the mother centriole, which is a prerequisite for MT assembly mediated by the γ-tubulin ring complexes (γ-TuRCs) and pericentrin [81]
Structural and numerical centrosome defects that promote erroneous microtubule-kinetochore attachments can manifest in whole chromosomal instability (w-CIN) and aneuploidy, both of which are hallmarks of human cancer
Summary
Centrosomes are evolutionarily conserved organelles that serve as main microtubuleorganizing centers (MTOCs) of animal cells with a key role in mitotic spindle organization, faithful chromosome segregation, cell polarity, adhesion, motility, migration, and cilia formation (reviewed in [1]). One prominent example of a synthetic estrogen implicated in the development of several endocrine related cancers is Bisphenol A (BPA), the most common industrial chemical plasticizer produced worldwide and a major environmental contaminant [12]. A growing number of in vitro and in vivo studies reported that natural and environmental estrogens including BPA disturb centrosome duplication, bipolar mitotic spindle formation, spindle microtubule attachment to kinetochores, and karyotype stability [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. How estrogens could induce centrosome defects, genomic instability and cancer in hormonally regulated tissues, will be discussed
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