Melanoma Inhibitory Activity Protein 1 (MIA1)

Growth and expansion of tumor cells including malignant melanomas are modulated by a complex network of growth factors, which regulate proliferation and cell-matrix interaction through a variety of different signal transduction pathways.

Bosserhoff et al. (1996) cloned the gene encoding MIA and described its genomic organization. The gene encodes a 131-amino acid prepropolypeptide with a 24-residue secretion signal peptide sequence. The authors identified the transcription start site of the gene and studied the expression characteristics of the gene promoter in human melanoma, epithelial, and undifferentiated cells. Bosserhoff et al. (1996) found by Northern blot analysis that the MIA gene was expressed in all melanoma cell lines tested but was not expressed in fibroblast or epithelial cell lines.