BRCA2 Expression in Breast Cancer Cell Lines

Copyright © 2013 Daniele Fanale et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Previously, it has been reported that hypoxia causes increased mutagenesis and alteration in DNA repair mechanisms. In 2005, an interesting study showed that hypoxia-induced decreases in BRCA1 expression and the consequent suppression of homologous recombination may lead to genetic instability. However, nothing is yet known about the involvement of BRCA2 in hypoxic conditions in breast cancer. Initially, a cell proliferation assay allowed us to hypothesize that hypoxia could negatively regulate the breast cancer cell growth in short term in vitro studies. Subsequently, we analyzed gene expression in breast cancer cell lines exposed to hypoxic condition bymicroarray analysis. Interestingly, genes involved inDNAdamage repair pathways such asmismatch repair, nucleotide excision repair, nonhomologous end-joining and homologous recombination repair were downregulated. In particular, we focused on the BRCA2 downregulation which was confirmed at mRNA and protein level. In addition, breast cancer cells were treatedwith dimethyloxalylglycine (DMOG), a cell-permeable inhibitor of both proline and asparaginyl hydroxylases able to induce HIF-