Oral Presentation 6th Annual Meeting for Australasian Society for Stem Cell Research 2013

The Ubiquitin Specific Protease, USP9x, is required for the cellular proliferation and mTOR activation, in immortalised human neural stem cells (ReNcells VM) (#40)

Caitlin R F Bridges 1 , MenChee Tan 1 , Stephen A Wood 1
  1. Eskitis Istitute for Cell and Molecular Therapies, Nathan, QLD, Australia

USP9x is a deubiquitylating enzyme that is highly expressed in neural progenitors in the developing murine brain. Increased levels of USP9x enhance neural progenitor self-renewal in vitro. Deletion of Usp9x in vivo affects several neural progenitor functions including proliferation, polarity and adhesion. To determine if USP9x has a direct role in neural progenitor/stem cell proliferation, we depleted USP9x protein using inducible shRNA interference in the immortalised human neural stem cell line, ReNcells VM. Depletion of USP9X rapidly led to a reduction in cellular density, reduced cellular proliferation and an accumulation of cells in the G0/G1 phase. To determine if cells were arresting at the G1-S phase transition, we investigated the status of cell cycle proteins involved at this phase and showed a reduction in phosphorylated retinoblastoma protein, pRbS780, whilst other cell cycle proteins levels remained unchanged. We also showed that after EGF/FGF stimulation there is reduced mTORC1 and mTORC2 activity, as measured by phosph-S6ser235/236 and phosphor-AktSer473, respectively, in USP9x depleted cells. We further demonstrated a reduction of mTORC1 and mTORC2 components: Raptor and Rictor. This suggests that USP9x may stabilise Raptor and Rictor proteins in neural stem cells to promote EGF/FGF signalling through the mTOR cell growth and proliferation cascade.