title: P53 and the defenses against genome instability caused by transposons and repetitive elements.
abstract: The recent publication by Wylie et al. is reviewed, demonstrating that the p53 protein regulates the movement of transposons. While this work presents genetic evidence for a piRNA-mediated p53 interaction with transposons in Drosophila and zebrafish, it is herein placed in the context of a decade or so of additional work that demonstrated a role for p53 in regulating transposons and other repetitive elements. The line of thought in those studies began with the observation that transposons damage DNA and p53 regulates DNA damage. The presence of transposon movement can increase the rate of evolution in the germ line and alter genes involved in signal transduction pathways. Transposition can also play an important role in cancers where the p53 gene function is often mutated. This is particularly interesting as recent work has shown that de-repression of repetitive elements in cancer has important consequences for the immune system and tumor microenvironment.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Advanced Study, School of Natural Sciences, The Simons Center for Systems Biology, Princeton, NJ, USA.|Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Arnold J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Levine
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA.|Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: David T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Ting
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology, and Pathology, Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Benjamin D
authors.initials: BD
authors.lastname: Greenbaum
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004247:DNA / Q000378:metabolism; D004249:DNA Damage; D004251:DNA Transposable Elements; D005260:Female; D042822:Genomic Instability; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012091:Repetitive Sequences, Nucleic Acid; D016159:Tumor Suppressor Protein p53
chemical_list: D004251:DNA Transposable Elements; D016159:Tumor Suppressor Protein p53; D004247:DNA
keywords: cancer biology; cancer immunology; endogenous elements; genome stability; innate immunity; repetitive elements; transposons