0000000000643867
AUTHOR
Dieudonné Nem
Evolutionary History and Functional Characterization of the Amphibian Xenosensor CAR
AbstractThe xenosensing constitutive androstane receptor (CAR) is widely considered to have arisen in early mammals via duplication of the pregnane X receptor (PXR). We report that CAR emerged together with PXR and the vitamin D receptor from an ancestral NR1I gene already in early vertebrates, as a result of whole-genome duplications. CAR genes were subsequently lost from the fish lineage, but they are conserved in all taxa of land vertebrates. This contrasts with PXR, which is found in most fish species, whereas it is lost from Sauropsida (reptiles and birds) and plays a role unrelated to xenosensing in Xenopus. This role is fulfilled in Xenopus by CAR, which exhibits low basal activity a…
Pregnane X receptor and yin yang 1 contribute to the differential tissue expression and induction of CYP3A5 and CYP3A4.
The hepato-intestinal induction of the detoxifying enzymes CYP3A4 and CYP3A5 by the xenosensing pregnane X receptor (PXR) constitutes a key adaptive response to oral drugs and dietary xenobiotics. In contrast to CYP3A4, CYP3A5 is additionally expressed in several, mostly steroidogenic organs, which creates potential for induction-driven disturbances of the steroid homeostasis. Using cell lines and mice transgenic for a CYP3A5 promoter we demonstrate that the CYP3A5 expression in these organs is non-inducible and independent from PXR. Instead, it is enabled by the loss of a suppressing yin yang 1 (YY1)-binding site from the CYP3A5 promoter which occurred in haplorrhine primates. This YY1 sit…
The unique complexity of the CYP3A4 upstream region suggests a nongenetic explanation of its expression variability.
The individually variable and unpredictable expression of CYP3A4 compromises therapies with 50% of contemporary drugs. Gene variants explain only a fraction of this variability.We investigated the evolution of CYP3A4 transcriptional regulation by nuclear receptors such as the xenobiotics sensors PXR and CAR.The combination of a proximal ER6 element with XREM and CLEM represents the original scheme of CYP3A regulation by nuclear receptors in placental mammals. Among human CYP3A genes, this scheme is retained only in CYP3A4, whereas non-CYP3A4 genes lost these elements to a variable extent during primate evolution. In parallel, the number of elements outside XREM and CLEM potentially responsi…