Mutations within the BRCA1 tumor suppressor gene occur frequently in familial epithelial ovarian carcinomas but they are a rare event in the much more prevalent sporadic form of the disease. However, decreased BRCA1 expression occurs frequently in sporadic tumors, and the magnitude of this decrease has been correlated with increased disease progression. The near absence of somatic mutations con...

BRCA1 plays numerous roles in the regulation of genome integrity and chemoresistance. Although BRCA1 interaction with key proteins involved in DNA repair is well known, its role as a coregulator in the transcriptional response to DNA damage remains poorly understood. In this study, we show that BRCA1 plays a central role in the transcriptional response to genotoxic stress in prostate cancer. BR...

Cucurbitacin B (CuB) is one of the potential agents for long term anticancer chemoprevention. Cumulative evidences has shown that cucurbitacin B provides potent cellular biological activities such as hepatoprotective, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial effects, but the precise mechanism of this agent is not clearly understood. We examine the biological effects on cancer cells of cucurbitacin B...

BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations are responsible for most familial breast carcinomas. Recent reports carried out in non-cancerous mouse BRCA1- or BRCA2-deficient embryonic stem (ES) cells, and hamster BRCA2-deficient cells have demonstrated that the targeted inhibition of poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP-1) kills BRCA mutant cells with high specificity. Although these studies bring hope for BRCA muta...

We carried out a yeast two-hybrid screen using a BRCA1 bait composed of amino acids 1 to 1142 and identified BRD7 as a novel binding partner of BRCA1. This interaction was confirmed by coimmunoprecipitation of endogenous BRCA1 and BRD7 in T47D and HEK-293 cells. BRD7 is a bromodomain containing protein, which is a subunit of PBAF-specific Swi/Snf chromatin remodeling complexes. To determine the...

The BRCA1 tumor suppressor contributes to the repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSB) through homologous recombination, but the mechanism is unknown. The rapid accumulation of BRCA1 into nuclear foci in response to induction of DNA breaks suggests that BRCA1 may function in an early step in the repair pathway. We examined the role of BRCA1 in one such early step, the resection of DSBs to gener...

Mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene 1 (BRCA1) are associated with an increased risk of developing epithelial ovarian cancer. However, beyond the role of BRCA1 in DNA repair, little is known about other mechanisms by which BRCA1 impairment promotes carcinogenesis. Given that altered metabolism is now recognized as important in the initiation and progression of cancer, we asked whe...

Breast cancer-associated protein 1 (BRCA1) forms foci at sites of induced DNA damage, but any significance of these normal S-phase foci is unknown. BRCA1 distribution does not simply mirror or overlap that of replicating DNA; however, BRCA1 foci frequently abut sites of BrdU incorporation, mostly at mid-to-late S phase. Although BRCA1 does not overlap XIST RNA across the inactive X chromosome, ...

The contribution of BRCA1 and BRCA2 to familial and non-familial forms of breast cancer has been difficult to accurately estimate because of the myriad of potential genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that can ultimately influence their expression and involvement in cellular activities. As one of these potential mechanisms, we investigated whether allelic imbalance (AI) of BRCA1 or BRCA2 expressi...