Eya1 immortalizes hematopoietic progenitor cells and is over-expressed in a subset of leukemia patient samples. (A) In vitro colony-forming assays. Primary mouse hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs) were transduced with retroviruses encoding Eya1, Six1, and both Eya1 and Six1. Numbers of colonies per dish at the third round of plating are shown (mean ± SD). After serial passage in methylcellulose, HPCs transduced with Eya1 produced tertiary colonies. Although transduction of Six1 by itself was not sufficient to immortalize HPCs, cotransduction with Eya1 resulted in increased tertiary colony formation compared with HPCs transduced with Eya1 alone. (B) Cancer outlier profile analysis (COPA) revealed EYA1 as a gene with outlier expression profile at the 75th percentile in the Valk et al acute myeloid leukemia dataset (n = 293).34 EYA1 expression is shown from all profiled samples in this dataset. The microarray data indicate that EYA1 is highly over-expressed in a subset of AML samples (76/293). The boxed region indicates 76 AML samples with overexpression of EYA1 among 293 patients examined. Visualization tools incorporated in Oncomine were used to generate graphical displays.28 “Normal” group includes 3 CD34+ selected and 5 unselected marrow samples; “Acute Myeloid Leukemia” group includes 285 samples.
