Towards the Understanding of the Relation between Chromatin Organization and Sub-Nuclear Pattern of Oncoprotein DEK

The DEK oncoprotein is a ubiquitous nuclear factor that has been consistently associated with tumor progression: its expression level differs between normal and cancer cells, raising the possibility of using DEK as a tumor marker. Moreover, DEK is a non-histone architectural chromatin factor that may influence nucleosomal accessibility and therefore gene activity. The interest of this work is to investigate, using super-resolution microscopy approaches, the correlation between the organization of the DEK oncoprotein and the local chromatin structure depending on the degree of cell malignancy. A model based on three well-established human breast cell lines was chosen to represent different subtypes of breast cancer (MCF10A, MCF7 and MDA-MB-231 cells). We performed dual-color confocal and STED imaging followed by the pixel intensity spatial correlation analysis, to show the differences of the nanoscale …