Implementacion de una estrategia para la deteccion y caracterizacion de nuevos genes reguladores de ciclo celular en arabidopsis thaliana y potenciales oncogenes y/o supresores tumorales en humanos.

Detection and characterization of new cell cycle gene regulators in arabidopsis thaliana and their characterization as potential oncogenes and/or tumor suppressors in humans. The cell cycle represents an accurately programmed series of events that enables a cell to duplicate its genome and to generate two daughter cells. In all eukaryotes studied to date, the cell division process is controlled by an evolutionarily conserved core machinery. Nevertheless, the numerous components controlling the molecular network that controls cell cycle progression has not been fully dissected. To fully understand the molecular mechanism that enables cell cycle progression, it is mandatory to try to elucidate new key components of the molecular network. Concomitantly, coordination of cell division with growth and development is essential for the survival of organisms. Mistakes made during replication of genetic material can cause growth defects or even cancer. Because of the essential role of the molecular machinery that controls DNa replication and mitosis during development, its high degree of conservation among organisms is not surprising. Mammalian cell cycle genes have orthologues in plants, and vice versa. By using and integrative strategy Quimbaya and collaborators[1] showed that exploring the arabidopsis thaliana genome, it is possible to find new cell cycle regulators in this model plant, which orthologues in humans behave as tumor suppressors or oncogenes. Quimbaya and colleges proposed a list of 339 orthologues pairs that resulted from a systematic comparison of arabidopsis and human genomes. This set of genes represents, according to Gene Ontology (GO), molecules without an assigned cellular function that have a high chance of being involved in cell cycle progression for both genomes. Similarly, Quimbaya and collaborators showed experimentally, that in fact, 40 out of these 339 genes represent new cell cycle regulators in the a. thaliana genome, and even more, proved that 6 human orthologues were associated with carcinogenic events as oncogenes [1]. With the present research we will implement, literature mining and comparative genomics tools in order to explore the gene list of 339 genes proposed by Quimbaya and colleagues to filter out new cell cycle regulators in arabidopsis thaliana, that additionally, have a high potential of being involved in carcinogenic events in humans, given its functional relation with already known cancer genes. Some of the new cell cycle regulators detected by our strategy will be analyzed experimentally by using a. thaliana mutants in order to complement the literature and the in silico analysis, with an experimental approach that validate experimentally the results here obtained.