Influences of the p53 status on hypoxia-induced gene expression

The p53 tumor-suppressor gene is one of the most frequently mutated genes in human cancers, and its genetic alterations may play critical roles in oncogenesis, tumor progression, and angiogenesis. To clarify the influence of the p53 status on hypoxia-inducible gene expression, we first performed transfection assays with a hypoxia-responsive vector carrying 5 hypoxia-responsive elements upstream of the human CMV minimal promoter driving transcription of the luciferase gene in various human tumor cell lines with wild-type (wt) or mutant (mut) p53. As a result, hypoxia responsiveness considerably varied between cell lines, and we could not obtain clear evidence that the hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) mediated gene expression in the wt-p53 cells was lower than that in cells with mut-p53. It is interesting that SaOS2 cells (p53 null) showed the highest luciferase activities under both aerobic and hypoxic conditions among tested cells. Next, to elucidate the effects of endogenous wt- and mut-p53s, a transfection assay and Northern blot analysis for VEGF transcription under hypoxia were performed by using isogenic variants of HT1080 cells differing in their p53 status. The luciferase and the endogenous VEGF mRNA expression were apparently lower in a variant carrying mutations in both p53 alleles than in a parental line harboring wt-p53, implying that some types of mutant p53 constitutively accumulated in cells can decrease both the basal and the hypoxia-induced expressions in addition to wt-p53.