Numerous clinical and animal studies show that hormone replacement therapy reduces the risk of colon tumor formation. However, the majority of experiments have shown that estradiol (E 2 ) does not inhibit the growth of malignantly transformed colon epithelia. As such, the presented studies focused on evaluating the effects of E 2 in noncancerous colonocytes. E 2 treatments (0-10 nmol/L) reduced cell growth and increased apoptotic activity in young adult mouse colonocytes (YAMC), a nonmalignant cell line, in a dose-responsive manner. These effects were lost in the YAMC-Ras cells, an isogenic cell line with a single malignant transformation. Cotreatment with an estrogen receptor (ER) antagonist inhibited the physiologic effects of E 2 in YAMC cells, suggesting that the response is ER mediated. To further study the effect of E 2 on colonic epithelia, we evaluated the development of preneoplastic lesions in ovariectomized wild-type (WT) and ERβ knockout (ERβKO) mice treated with either vehicle or E 2 . WT E 2 -treated animals exhibited significantly fewer aberrant crypt foci and increased apoptotic activity in colonic epithelia when compared with WT control mice or ERβKO animals receiving either treatment. For the first time, we showed that E 2 alters the growth of nontransformed colonocytes in vitro and that, through an ERβ-mediated mechanism, E 2 influences the physiology of noncancerous colonocytes, resulting in fewer preneoplastic lesions. Collectively, these data show that the protective actions of E 2 occur primarily during the initiation/promotion stages of disease development and identify the hormone as an important chemoprotective agent. [Cancer Res 2009;69(23):9118-24]

PRDM1 is a tumor suppressor that plays an important role in B and T cell lymphomas. Our previous studies demonstrated that PRDM1β is a p53-response gene in human colorectal cancer cells. However, the function of PRDM1β in colorectal cancer cells and colon tumor organoids is not clear. Here we show that PRDM1β is a p53-response gene in human colon organoids and that low PRDM1 expression predicts poor survival in colon cancer patients. We engineered PRDM1 knockouts and overexpression clones in RKO cells and characterized the PRDM1-dependent transcript landscapes, revealing that both the α and β transcript isoforms repress MYC-response genes and stem cell-related genes. Finally, we show that forced expression of PRDM1 in human colon cancer organoids prevents the formation and growth of colon tumor organoids in vitro. These results suggest that p53 may exert tumor-suppressive effects in part through a PRDM1-dependent silencing of stem cell genes, depleting the size of the normal intestinal stem cell compartment in response to DNA damage.

RNA interference is a powerful experimental tool for RNA knockdown, but not all organisms are amenable. Here, we provide a proof of principle demonstration that a type III Csm effector complex can be used for programmable mRNA transcript degradation in eukaryotes. In zebrafish, Streptococcus thermophilus Csm complex (StCsm) proved effective for knockdown of maternally expressed EGFP in germ cells of Tg(ddx4:ddx4-EGFP) fish. It also led to significant, albeit less drastic, fluorescence reduction at one day postfertilization in Tg(myl7:GFP) and Tg(fli1:EGFP) fish that express EGFP zygotically. StCsm targeted against the endogenous tdgf1 elicited the characteristic one-eyed phenotype with greater than 50% penetrance, and hence with similar efficiency to morpholino-mediated knockdown. We conclude that Csm-mediated knockdown is very efficient for maternal transcripts and can also be used for mixed maternal/early zygotic and early zygotic transcripts, in some cases reaching comparable efficiency to morpholino-based knockdown without significant off-target effects.

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