The Wnt signaling pathway plays a crucial role in human cancer development, and axis inhibition protein 2 (Axin2) is a master scaffold protein involved in Wnt signaling. Axin2 negatively regulates Wnt signaling and acts as a tumor suppressor protein. The present study evaluated the association between the Axin2 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs2240308 [guanine (G)/adenine (A)] and the inc...

Wnt signaling is required for both the development and homeostasis of the skin, yet its contribution to skin wound repair remains controversial. By employing Axin2(LacZ/+) reporter mice we evaluated the spatial and temporal distribution patterns of Wnt responsive cells, and found that the pattern of Wnt responsiveness varies with the hair cycle, and correlates with wound healing potential. Usin...

Wnt signaling is a critical regulator of bone development, but the identity and role of the Wnt-producing cells are still unclear. We addressed these questions through in situ hybridization, lineage tracing, and genetic experiments. First, we surveyed the expression of all 19 Wnt genes and Wnt target gene Axin2 in the neonatal mouse bone by in situ hybridization, and demonstrated--to our knowle...

Accumulated evidence suggests that alterations due to mutations or genetic polymorphisms in the AXIN2 tumor suppressor gene, a component of the Wnt signaling pathway, contributes to carcinogenesis. The effect of the AXIN2 exon 1 148 C↷T polymorphism was recently investigated in a Japanese population, but has not been investigated in other populations. Additionally, other common polymorphisms of...

Menin is a tumor suppressor protein mutated in patients with multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1. We show that menin is essential for canonical Wnt/beta-catenin signaling in cultured rodent islet tumor cells. In these cells, overexpression of menin significantly enhances TCF gene assay reporter activity in response to beta-catenin activation. Contrastingly, inhibition of menin expression with M...

The Wnt signaling pathway transducing the stabilization of β-catenin is essential for metazoan embryo development and is misregulated in many diseases such as cancers. In recent years models have been proposed for the Wnt signaling pathway during the segmentation process in developing embryos. Many of these include negative feedback loops where Axin2 plays a key role. However, Axin2 null mice s...

The product of AXIN2, a component of Wnt signalling, plays a role in tumorigenesis and is dysregulated in cancer cells. In order to determine whether the AXIN2 polymorphism is a risk factor for astrocytoma, we analysed eight polymorphic regions of this gene in 100 astrocytoma patients compared to 100 healthy controls in a Turkish population using PCR-RFLP methods. For the Exon1-148 T/C, Exon1-4...

BACKGROUND The Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway is an important regulator of cellular functions such as proliferation, survival and cell adhesion. Wnt/β-catenin signaling is associated with tumor initiation and progression; β-catenin mutations explain only 30% of aberrant signaling found in breast cancer, indicating that other components and/or regulation of the Wnt/β-catenin pathway may be invo...

The objective of the present study was to search for Msh homeobox 1 (MSX1), paired box gene 9 (PAX9), ectodysplasin‑A (EDA) and axis inhibition protein 2 (AXIN2) variants in a family with isolated oligodontia and analyse the pathogenesis of mutations that result in oligodontia phenotypes. Members of a single family (but of different descent) with oligodontia and unrelated healthy controls were ...