Human Gene Set: AIGNER_ZEB1_TARGETS


Standard name AIGNER_ZEB1_TARGETS
Systematic name M14590
Brief description Genes up-regulated in MDA-MB-231 cells (breast cancer) after knockdown of ZEB1 [GeneID=6935] by RNAi.
Full description or abstract Epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) is implicated in the progression of primary tumours towards metastasis and is likely caused by a pathological activation of transcription factors regulating EMT in embryonic development. To analyse EMT-causing pathways in tumourigenesis, we identified transcriptional targets of the E-cadherin repressor ZEB1 in invasive human cancer cells. We show that ZEB1 repressed multiple key determinants of epithelial differentiation and cell-cell adhesion, including the cell polarity genes Crumbs3, HUGL2 and Pals1-associated tight junction protein. ZEB1 associated with their endogenous promoters in vivo, and strongly repressed promotor activities in reporter assays. ZEB1 downregulation in undifferentiated cancer cells by RNA interference was sufficient to upregulate expression of these cell polarity genes on the RNA and protein level, to re-establish epithelial features and to impair cell motility in vitro. In human colorectal cancer, ZEB1 expression was limited to the tumour-host interface and was accompanied by loss of intercellular adhesion and tumour cell invasion. In invasive ductal and lobular breast cancer, upregulation of ZEB1 was stringently coupled to cancer cell dedifferentiation. Our data show that ZEB1 represents a key player in pathologic EMTs associated with tumour progression.
Collection C2: Curated
      CGP: Chemical and Genetic Perturbations
Source publication Pubmed 17486063   Authors: Aigner K,Dampier B,Descovich L,Mikula M,Sultan A,Schreiber M,Mikulits W,Brabletz T,Strand D,Obrist P,Sommergruber W,Schweifer N,Wernitznig A,Beug H,Foisner R,Eger A
Exact source Table 1
Related gene sets (show 14 gene sets from any of these authors)
External links
Filtered by similarity ?
Source species Homo sapiens
Contributed by Leona Saunders (MSigDB Team)
Source platform or
identifier namespace		 HUMAN_GENE_SYMBOL
Dataset references  
Download gene set format: grp | gmt | xml | json | TSV metadata
Compute overlaps ? (show collections to investigate for overlap with this gene set)
Compendia expression profiles ? NG-CHM interactive heatmaps
(Please note that clustering takes a few seconds)
GTEx compendium
Human tissue compendium (Novartis)
Global Cancer Map (Broad Institute)
NCI-60 cell lines (National Cancer Institute)

Legacy heatmaps (PNG)
GTEx compendium
Human tissue compendium (Novartis)
Global Cancer Map (Broad Institute)
NCI-60 cell lines (National Cancer Institute)
Advanced query Further investigate these 35 genes
Gene families ? Categorize these 35 genes by gene family
Show members (show 37 source identifiers mapped to 35 genes)
Version history 3.0: First introduced

See MSigDB license terms here. Please note that certain gene sets have special access terms.