Saturday, October 29, 2011
Hall 1-2 (San Jose Convention Center)
Man-made and natural compounds with estrogenic properties are rapidly becoming a topic of concern due to their potential effects on sexual development and hormone-sensitive cancers. One ubiquitous compound used in a variety of plastics and dental sealants, Bisphenol A, induces chromosome segregation anomalies in rodent oocytes, and previous work in the lab suggested that BPA induces aneuploidy by stimulating the formation of multipolar spindles. Intriguingly, this effect on spindle assembly appeared to be independent of the estrogen receptor, the most well-characterized target of BPA. Because this previous study used a cervical adenocarcinoma cell line (HeLa) cells, we have examined the BPA effect on spindle assembly on a variety of cell lines with known estrogen receptor expression profiles. A variety of lines have been screened and the phenotypes characterized. We have used RNA interference (RNAi) to deplete specific estrogen receptor isoforms to confirm whether the capacity of BPA to induce multipolar spindles is truly independent of the estrogen receptor. Our findings will be reported in our poster. Supported by PHS grant no. R25 GM048998-13.