Service Items

1. Transient transfection:

Human lung adenocarcinoma cell A549 or other candidate cell will be transient transfected with the CRMP-1 promoter/Luc Reporter plasmid using liposome-based method. The applied DNA construct contains the 1.9 kb promoter region of CRMP-1 gene and the luciferase gene as reporter.  The plasmid base used was the pGL3-basic plasmid (Promega).

2. Treatment of testing cells with candidate compounds and positive controls.

3. Measurement of luciferase activities and analysis report.

Applications

        Screening for agents or compounds, which could induce the expression of hCRMP-1.  The increase of luciferase activity measured after the treatment of CRMP-1 promoter/Luc Reporter Cells indirectly means the up-regulation of hCRMP-1 level. 

Background information

      Human CRMP-1 was reported as “a lung cancer invasion suppressor gene with nerve” (Ref. 2).  Recent discovery showed that the level of expression of the gene encoding CRMP-1 inversely affects cancer invasion and metastasis, (i.e., the higher the level of expression, the lower the incidence of cancer invasion and metastasis) and thus characterized the CRMP-1 gene as an invasion-suppression gene (Ref. 3-5). Further analysis of around 50 cases of clinical lung tissue samples using real time-quantitative PCR techniques found that low-expression patients of CRMP-1 had more advanced diseases and lymph node metastases, while high-expression patients of CRMP-1 had a significantly longer disease-free and overall survival period.  “CRMP-1 as an excellent target for lung cancer” was interpreted by the web “bioportfolio” (Ref. 6).

References

(1) Steeg (2001) J. Natl. Cancer Inst. (2001), 93(18): 1364-1365

(2) Shih et al., J. Natl. Cancer Inst. (2001), 93(18): 1392-1400.

(3) Chu et al., Am. J. Respir. Cell Mol. Biol. (1997), 17:353-360.

(4) Shih et al., Clinical & Exper. Metastasis (2003) 20: 69-76).

(5) http://www.bioportfolio.com/LeadDiscovery/Pubmed-110112.htm