Investigating The Role of STAT6 (2013)
Undergraduates: Christopher Felix, Gloria Hsia
Faculty Advisor: Albert Baldwin
Department: Biology
The STAT family of proteins, or ¿Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription¿, is involved in cytokine-mediated signal transduction and plays a major role in the regulation of cell differentiation and growth. More specifically, data supports the hypothesis that STAT6 is involved in the progression of prostate cancer and immunological responses, making it an interesting member STAT family to investigate. STAT6 also functions within the process of innate immunity, the first defense response to a microbial infection.
The proteins NF-κB is a family of transcription factors that play a major role in immune signaling. Deregulation of NF-κB has also been linked to cancer. The inhibitor of κB (IκB) and IκB kinases (IKKs) are needed in order to regulate NF-κB. One IKK-related kinases, known as TANK-binding kinases 1 (TBK1), has been recently identified and shown to regulate the activation of NF-κB. In addition, TBK1 is also a central mediator of the signaling in response to microbial infection. TBK1 was found to induce phosphorylation of STAT6 at serine 733.
The purpose of this initial experiment was to clone STAT6 into a mammalian expression vector, to ectopically express STAT6 with TBK1 in cells, then determine if the phosphorylation of STAT6 is induced by TBK1 in order to find novel phosphorylation sites. In another experiment, the same three goals are attempted but with a mutated version of STAT6, STAT6 S733A.