The research progress of p53 tumour suppressor activity controlled by Numb in triple-negative breast cancer

Abstract Numb is known as a cell fate determinant as it determines the direction of cell differentiation by asymmetrically partitioning at mitosis. It has been shown to be a tumor suppressor, and there is frequent loss of Numb expression in breast cancer. Numb enters in a tricomplex with p53 and the E3 ubiquitin ligase HDM2 (also known as MDM2), thereby preventing ubiquitination and degradation of p53. The aim of this study was to investigate the expression and migration of Numb, HDM2 and p53 proteins in the membrane, cytoplasmic and nuclear fractions of MCF-10A cells and MDA-MB-231 cells. We extracted the cell fractions to detect changes of these three protein levels after re-expression of NUMB in the basal-like triple-negative cell line MDA-MB-231 and knocking down NUMB in the normal mammary epithelial cell line MCF-10A. Our results show that Numb protein can migrate from cytoplasm to nucleus of the MDA-MB-231 cells. Numb protein regulates p53 levels in nucleus of MCF-10A cells and MDA-MB-231 cells, and the Numb levels is positively correlated with p53 levels. We have a finding on HDM2 protein that after knocking down NUMB in MCF-10A cells, it was remarkably reduced in the membrane fraction of NUMB knockdown cells, but its mRNA levels was significantly increased. We also examined the Numb expression in 125 patients with triple-negative breast cancer, 61(48.8%) displayed deficient or reduced expression of Numb. The percent of Ki67>14% in retained Numb group was significantly lower than that in the reduced and deficient Numb group (86.00% vs. 98.40%, P=0.0171).