HIGH-MOBILITY-GROUP PROTEINS AND CANCER - AN EMERGING LINK

In the last few years, considerable interest has been generated in the role of high-mobility-group (HMG) proteins, and HMG box proteins gene rally, in cancer development and therapy. These proteins were discover ed in the early 1970s (Goodwin et al. 1973) as a group of non-histone proteins. Some members of the HMG protein family (i) constitute a clas s of important architectural proteins involved in transcriptional regu lation of genes, (ii) are frequently expressed in transformed cells at levels that correlate with the degree of neoplastic cell transformati on, (iii) participate in gene rearrangements, which are linked to the emergence of benign solid tumors, (iv) confer the ability to recognize DNA-cisplatin adducts selectively, and (v) provide a new delivery sys tem for efficient gene transfer. It should be considered that some HMG proteins, acting as architectural proteins that bring many of the tra nscription factors into precise three-dimensional shapes, may have a s imilar critical role in neoplastic transformation to that of some tran scription factors themselves.