Stem-cell-abundant proteins Nanog, Nucleostemin and Musashi1 are highly expressed in malignant cervical epithelial cells

In this study, expression of Nanog, NS and Msi1 was detected by immunohistochemistry analysis in 235 patients with various degrees of cervical epithelial lesions, including 49 with normal cervical epithelia, 31 with mild dysplasia (CIN I), 77 with moderate-severe dysplasia (CIN II-III) and 78 with squamous cervical carcinomas (SCCs). Associations with various clinical pathological prognostic variables were analyzed in 50 early-stage SCC patients.Nanog, NS and Msi1 expression levels were significantly higher in SCC patients compared with CIN patients, and were higher in CIN patients compared with those with normal cervical epithelia. Nanog expression levels showed significantly differences according to different tumor sizes (P < 0.05), whereas there were no differences in NS and Msi1 expression levels according to different clinical pathological parameters.Our findings indicate that Nanog, NS and Msi1 may be involved in carcinogenesis of the cervix and progression of cervical carcinoma.The stem-cell-abundant proteins Nanog, nucleostemin (NS) and Musashi1 (Msi1) are highly expressed in undifferentiated embryonic stem cells, and regulate stem-cell differentiation, proliferation and asymmetric division, respectively. Nanog is a unique homeobox transcription factor and has a homeodomain with homology to members of the natural killer (NK) gene family[1]; indeed, it has a similar critical role in regulating the cell fate of the pluripotent ICM (inner cell mass) during embryonic development, maintaining the pluripotent epiblast and preventing differentiation [2,3]. NS is a putative GTPase that binds to P53 and is highly expressed in the nucleoli of neuronal and embryonic stem cells, and several cancer cell lines. NS is essential for stem- and cancer-cell proliferation [4]. Msi1 is an RNA-binding protein that is abundantly expressed in neural stem/progenitor cells, astroglial progenitor cells and astrocytes in the vertebrate central nervous system[5] and regulates the expres