There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Retinoids play an important role in lung development. Recently, prenatal treatment
with retinoic acid (RA) has been reported to stimulate alveologenesis in hypoplastic
lungs in the nitrofen model of congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH). Chicken ovalbumin
upstream promoter-transcription factor II (COUP-TFII) is a transcription factor in
the steroid/thyroid hormone receptor superfamily, and targeted ablation of COUP-TFII
causes CDH and associated lung hypoplasia in mice. Friend of GATA 2 (FOG2) is a zinc
finger-containing protein that modulates the transcriptional activity of GATA proteins.
GATA4 is a member of a family of DNA-binding proteins, which is found in the promoter
regions of many genes. The COUP-TFII, FOG2, and GATA4 genes, regulated by the retinoid
signaling pathway, are located on chromosomes 15q26, 8q23, and 8p23.1 respectively,
regions reported to be deleted in individuals with CDH. The aim of this study was
to examine the pulmonary gene expression of COUP-TFII, FOG2, and GATA4 in the nitrofen
model of CDH.