Pol iota is a candidate for the mouse pulmonary adenoma resistance 2 locus, a major modifier of chemically induced lung neoplasia.

In this study, we performed systematic candidate gene analyses of the Pulmonary adenoma resistance 2 locus. Differential gene expression in lung tissues and nucleotide polymorphisms in coding regions between A/J and BALB/cJ mice were examined using reverse transcription-PCR and direct sequencing. Although not all genes in the interval were analyzed at this moment due to the recent database updating, we have found that the Pol ι gene, encoding the DNA polymerase ι, contains 25 nucleotide polymorphisms in its coding region between A/J and BALB/cJ mice, resulting in a total of ten amino acid changes. Primer extension assays with purified BALB/cJ and A/J proteins in vitro demonstrate that both forms of Pol ι are active but that they may differ in substrate discrimination, which may affect the formation of Kras2 mutations in mouse lung tumors. Altered expression of POL ι protein and an amino acid-changing nucleotide polymorphism were observed in human lung cancer cells, suggesting a possible role in the development of lung cancer. Thus, our data support the Pol ι gene as a modifier of lung tumorigenesis by altering DNA polymerase activity.