Rabbit Anti-Human MEGF10 Polyclonal Antibody

Advanced age is the greatest risk factor for neurodegenerative disorders, but the mechanisms that render the senescent brain vulnerable to disease are unclear. Glial immune responses provide neuroprotection in a variety of contexts. Thus, we explored how glial responses to neurodegeneration are altered with age. Here we show that glia-axon phagocytic interactions change dramatically in the aged Drosophila brain. Aged glia clear degenerating axons slowly due to low phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K) signalling and, subsequently, reduced expression of the conserved phagocytic receptor Draper/MEGF10. Importantly, boosting PI3K/Draper activity in aged glia significantly reverses slow phagocytic responses. Moreover, several hours post axotomy, early hallmarks of Wallerian degeneration (WD) are delayed in aged flies. We propose that slow clearance of degenerating axons is mechanistically twofold, resulting from deferred initiation of axonal WD and reduced PI3K/Draper-dependent glial phagocytic function. Interventions that boost glial engulfment activity, however, can substantially reverse delayed clearance of damaged neuronal debris.

Neuroblastoma is a childhood cancer in which many children still have poor outcomes, emphasising the need to better understand its pathogenesis. Despite recent genome-wide mutation analyses, many primary neuroblastomas do not contain recognizable driver mutations, implicating alternate molecular pathologies such as epigenetic alterations. To discover genes that become epigenetically deregulated during neuroblastoma tumorigenesis, we took the novel approach of comparing neuroblastomas to neural crest precursor cells, using genome-wide DNA methylation analysis. We identified 93 genes that were significantly differentially methylated of which 26 (28%) were hypermethylated and 67 (72%) were hypomethylated. Concentrating on hypermethylated genes to identify candidate tumor suppressor loci, we found the cell engulfment and adhesion factor gene MEGF10 to be epigenetically repressed by DNA hypermethylation or by H3K27/K9 methylation in neuroblastoma cell lines. MEGF10 showed significantly down-regulated expression in neuroblastoma tumor samples; furthermore patients with the lowest-expressing tumors had reduced relapse-free survival. Our functional studies showed that knock-down of MEGF10 expression in neuroblastoma cell lines promoted cell growth, consistent with MEGF10 acting as a clinically relevant, epigenetically deregulated neuroblastoma tumor suppressor gene. (C) 2016 The Authors. Molecular Carcinogenesis Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.