Abstract 2342: Related study on the fat mass and obesity associated FTO gene and melanoma

Proceedings: AACR Annual Meeting 2014; April 5-9, 2014; San Diego, CA FTO is a Fe(II)/2-oxoglutarate-dependent oxidative DNA/RNA demethylase and plays a key role in the fat metabolism and several chronic illnesses including cancer development. Several independent SNPs in the intron 8 of the FTO gene, showed nominally significant association with risk of melanoma. But the functional regulatory mechanism of FTO protein is poorly understood. Thus, the research of downstream factors and interaction proteins of FTO may identification of the mechanism FTO participated in and discovery of the FTO pathway may provide a noval evidence to the diagnosis and put forward new targets for the treatment of melanoma. Recent reports show that there is an important link between FTO and melanoma cancer. Our recent studies find that there are differences of FTO expression between normal skin and melanoma cancer. First of all, higher FTO protein expression was detected by western blot in melanoma cancer cells, compared with primary cultured normal skin cells. However, the mRNA expression of both normal tissue and melanoma cancer are at the similar level. Secondly, FTO expression was also investigated in 80 clinical samples. Compared with normal skin tissues, malignant melanoma tissues had stronger positive immunohistochemical (IHC) staining of FTO in nucleus, and IHC scoring confirmed the significantly higher FTO protein expression in carcinoma tissues. In the normal skin tissues, FTO only expressed in basal nuclei; but in the melanoma cancer, FTO expressed in the dermal cells both at the nucleus and membrane. Especially, the expression of FTO is closely related with the pathological staging of melanoma. The increased FTO expression in melanoma carcinoma suggested that aberrant FTO expression may be an early molecular event in cancer development. Simultaneously, we focus on identifying the specific regulation function of FTO in the melanoma cancer cell, using the cDNA microarray and Two-dimensional fluorescence difference gel electrophoresis combining with MALDI-TOF-MS technique to screen the interaction proteins and their mutual regulation, determine the molecules interaction with FTO in the melanoma cancer development. Taken together, these data demonstrated that there is an important link between FTO and melanoma cancer, FTO gene plays an important role in melanoma pathogenesis. Note: This abstract was not presented at the meeting. Citation Format: Tianhui Niu, Min Xiong, Yan Tian. Related study on the fat mass and obesity associated FTO gene and melanoma. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2014 Apr 5-9; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2014;74(19 Suppl):Abstract nr 2342. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2014-2342