Regulation of zebrafish melanocyte development by ligand-dependent BMP signaling
UMass Chan Affiliations
Graduate School of Biomedical SciencesDepartment of Molecular Cell, and Cancer Biology
Program in Molecular Medicine
Document Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2019-12-23Keywords
cancer biologydevelopmental biology
zebrafish
UMCCTS funding
Cancer Biology
Cells
Cellular and Molecular Physiology
Developmental Biology
Embryonic Structures
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Preventing terminal differentiation is important in the development and progression of many cancers including melanoma. Recent identification of the BMP ligand GDF6 as a novel melanoma oncogene showed GDF6-activated BMP signaling suppresses differentiation of melanoma cells. Previous studies have identified roles for GDF6 orthologs during early embryonic and neural crest development, but have not identified direct regulation of melanocyte development by GDF6. Here, we investigate the BMP ligand gdf6a, a zebrafish ortholog of human GDF6, during the development of melanocytes from the neural crest. We establish that the loss of gdf6a or inhibition of BMP signaling during neural crest development disrupts normal pigment cell development, leading to an increase in the number of melanocytes and a corresponding decrease in iridophores, another neural crest-derived pigment cell type in zebrafish. This shift occurs as pigment cells arise from the neural crest and depends on mitfa, an ortholog of MITF, a key regulator of melanocyte development that is also targeted by oncogenic BMP signaling. Together, these results indicate that the oncogenic role ligand-dependent BMP signaling plays in suppressing differentiation in melanoma is a reiteration of its physiological roles during melanocyte development.Source
Elife. 2019 Dec 23;8. pii: e50047. doi: 10.7554/eLife.50047. [Epub ahead of print] Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.7554/eLife.50047Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/41304PubMed ID
31868592Related Resources
Rights
© 2019, Gramann et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.7554/eLife.50047
Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2019, Gramann et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.