Induction of Cyclin D1 Gene in Myeloma Cells Down-Regulates the Expression of Cyclin D2.

Cyclin D is dysregulated in at least two-thirds of multiple myeloma (MM) tumors. In addition, recent reports showed that the dysregulation of cyclin D1 is frequent in the absence of a t(11;14) translocation in MM. However, as we also reported (Int J Oncol, 2004), there appears to be no obvious correlation between the expression of cyclin D1 and the proliferation index (PI) or Ki67 expression. Therefore, we thought that the down-regulation of cyclin D2 might offset the expression of cyclin D1 in myeloma cells with cyclin D1 overexpression in cDNA microarray, since primary myeloma cells or myeloma cell lines express cyclin D3 ubiquitously. Here we transfected cyclin D1 gene into a myeloma cell line (RPMI8226), originally not expressing cyclin D1, using a retrovirus-mediated gene transfer system. In this method we inserted a 1.1 kb fragment containing the open reading frame of cyclin D1 removing from a tet-cyclin D1 plasmid (kindly provided by Dr. Reed SI, MCB, 1994) into a retrovirus vector (pQCXIP). First, we analyzed the expression of cyclin D1 in the bulk culture of cyclin D1 transfectant. We detected the expression of cyclin D1 by western blot, and found that the limited numbers of transfectant expressed cyclin D1 protein by immunohistocytochemical staining. Subsequently, we separated the two types of cyclin D1 transfectant by limiting dilution. Both transfectants showed the expression of cyclin D1 mRNA in RT-PCR, however, one of the two did not show the expression of cyclin D1 protein in western blot and immunohistocytochemical staining. Interestingly, we clearly detected the down-regulation of cyclin D2 mRNA in the transfectant with cyclin D1 protein expression by RQ-PCR. Furthermore, we detected an increase of cells in S phase in the transfectant with cyclin D1 protein by flow cytometry. Unlike in the study of Lamb J et al. (Cell, 2003), we could not observe the induction of IL-6 by the transfection of cyclin D1 gene. Although the mechanism of the impairment of cyclin D1 translation is unclear, here we suggest that the lack of correlation between the expression of cyclin D1 and PI might be due to the impairment of cyclin D1 translation or the offset of the expression of cyclin D1 by the down-regulation of cyclin D2. We are now analyzing the effects of velcade and IMiDs on these transfectants, since we suspect that these differences would affect the response to chemotherapy for MM. Furthermore, we are going to analyze the difference of gene expression between these transfectants using cDNA microaray. Therefore, these transfectants could be useful materials to analyze the cyclin D1 dysregulation in myeloma cells.