Shape-shifting and tumor suppression by PLZF

Copyright: C 2010 Hobbs et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The promyelocytic leukemia zinc finger (PLZF) tran-scription factor is directly implicated in tumor suppression although the relevant target genes remain poorly defined. Shi et al. now implicate smooth muscle α-actin and changes in cytoskeletal architecture as key downstream targets of PLZF in opposing cellular transformation. PLZF is a transcriptional repressor belonging to the POZ-Krüppel (POK) family of transcription factors with critical roles in oncogenesis, development and stem cell maintenance [1-7]. The amino-terminal POZ domain of PLZF recruits transcriptional co-repressors and histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity while carboxy-termina