| Genetic Dissection of PTEN Signaling Mechanisms in Prostate Cancer (1998) | |||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||
| The goal of my traineeship is to employ genetic approaches to investigate PTEN signaling in prostate cancer. My first task was to construct expression vectors for a series of tumor-derived PTEN mutations and test these for the ability to perform a diverse set of PTEN functions. This mutant analysis is 75% complete and will be submitted for publication this year. My second task was to set-up and perform a large-scale RNAi screen to identify novel components involved in PTEN signaling. Setting-up this screening system has proven to be very difficult. After trying many approaches it appears that we have finally identified a tractable screening system. Initially, we tried to set-up to do a luciferase reporter screen, but the dynamic range was not suitable for screening. We switched to doing a suppressor screen using inducible PTEN. My second year of funding will primarily focus on performing this screen. While setting up the PTEN RNAi screen we found that a TRAIL luciferase reporter can be used to monitor endogenous Pi3K pathway activity from the insulin receptor to the transcriptional outputs; this work now comprises a full manuscript which will be submitted for publication. | |||||||||||
Publication details | |||||||||||
| |||||||||||