No abstract

Amphiregulin (AR), a heparin-binding, epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor ligand has homology with EGF but exhibits a lower affinity for the EGF receptor than EGF. As the mature form of AR is truncated at the C terminus and lacks a conserved leucine residue known to be essential for high affinity binding of EGF to the EGF receptor, wild-type AR (AR1-84), a C-terminally extended AR construct incorporating six residues from the predicted coding sequence of AR (AR1-90) and a similarly extended construct with a Met86 to Leu substitution (AR1-90(leu86)) were expressed as recombinant proteins in yeast, purified by heparin affinity and C18 reverse phase chromatography and their relative biological activities determined. The growth factors were tested in mitogenesis and EGF receptor autophosphorylation assays and their relative order of potencies was found to be leu86> met86 > wt. The AR1-90(leu86) construct was found to be 50- to 100-fold more active than wild type AR1-84 consistent with previously reported studies of the role of the equivalent C-terminal leucine in EGF or TGF alpha. Significantly, the C-terminally extended form of AR, AR1-90, which utilized six residues from the predicted coding sequence, was 10-times more active than wild type AR1-84. This difference in activity of the C-terminally extended form of AR may be of biological significance since differential proteolytic processing of the AR precursor in vivo could result in production of multiple forms of the growth factor with differing affinities for the EGF receptor and hence differing biological potencies.

Sustained neutrophil recruitment in the CF airway may therefore be related not only to increased IL-8 expression but also to the increased stability and prolonged activity and retention of IL-8 when it is bound to HSPG in bronchial tissue.

No abstract

Two morphologically distinct cell lines, GP2d and GP5d, derived from the same adenocarcinoma of the colon, have been established and characterised. Both clones have the same genetic changes, consistent with the usual pattern of tumour progression in colon cancer. The cells also have an inverted duplication of bands 10q11 to 10q21, but Southern blot analysis failed to identify any translocations involving the ret protooncogene, which maps to this region. GP2d grew by spreading from the edges of microcolonies to form a confluent layer of cells. GP5d grew in discrete islands of cells forming multi-layered colonies. These differing patterns of growth correlated with variation in expression or cellular distribution of alpha 2-integrin, desmoplakin and e-cadherin. Only GP2d responded to exogenously added epidermal growth factor (EGF), transforming growth factor-alpha (TGF alpha) or insulin with an increase in cell numbers, even though both cell lines possessed similar numbers of EGF receptors. Analysis of EGF receptor ligand expression showed that GP5d cells expressed relatively more TGF alpha mRNA than did GP2d; in contrast, amphiregulin mRNA, which was abundant in GP2d, was virtually undetectable in GP5d. Even though GP5d failed to exhibit a growth response to EGF, it underwent a marked epithelial-mesenchymal transition when treated with EGF, indicating separation of growth and morphological responses to EGF.