Research progresses of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay in tumori-genesis and cancer therapy
Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay(NMD)is a highly conserved post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism in eukaryotic cells.NMD can recognize and degrade abnormal transcripts con-taining premature termination codons(PTC)to pre-vent the translation of C-terminal truncated pro-teins.Furthermore,NMD could degrade a subset of normal gene transcripts and thus fine-tune gene ex-pression.NMD is essential for cell fate determina-tion,stress response,as well as animal develop-ment.In this review,we briefly discussed the func-tional and molecular mechanisms of NMD pathway activation and inhibition in tumorigenesis,cancer progression and therapy.Current studies indicate that NMD factor mutations can lead to a variety of human tumors.Interestingly,inhibition of NMD fac-tors can activate DNA damage response and inhibit the expression of oncogenic factors,thereby killing cancer cells.This review may provide new perspec-tives for the biological mechanism and therapeutic strategy of human tumors.