RESEARCH ARTICLE
Quantitative Analysis of the Expression of Human N-myristoyltransferase 1 (hNMT-1) in Cancers
Lifeng Chen, Binbing Ling, Jane Alcorn, Jian Yang*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 2
First Page: 6
Last Page: 10
Publisher ID: TOBIOMJ-2-6
DOI: 10.2174/1875318300902010006
Article History:
Received Date: 04/09/2008Revision Received Date: 06/01/2009
Acceptance Date: 10/02/2009
Electronic publication date: 13/3/2009
Collection year: 2009

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Human N-myristoyltransferase 1 (hNMT-1) catalyzes the covalent attachment of myristic acid to N-terminal glycine residues (myristoylation) of numerous protein substrates. Overexpression of hNMT-1 in colorectal and gallbladder cancers makes it a potential biomarker and drug design target for such cancers. In this study, we investigated hNMT-1 expression during the progression of eight different human cancers using quantitative RT-PCR. The study results showed that hNMT-1 was up-regulated in breast, colon, lung and ovarian cancers but not kidney, liver, prostate and thyroid cancers. This suggests a role for hNMT-1 as a biomarker for detection of breast, colon, lung and ovarian cancers. This study also suggests the available hNMT-1 inhibitors may be potential therapeutic agents against breast and lung cancers through all disease stages, although their use would likely be limited to early stage colon and ovarian cancers.