Synaptonemal Complex Protein 3 Transcript Analysis in Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer in women. Cancer/Testis antigens are immunogenic proteins ectopically expressed in human neoplasms. Synaptonemal complex protein 3 (SYCP3) belongs to cancer/testis genes family involved in meiotic events and spermatogenesis. The aim of this study was to express analysis of SYCP3 in breast cancer and validate it as a breast cancer biomarker.
Expression of SYCP3 transcripts in 47 breast tumors, 6 breast cancer cell lines (MCF7, SKBR3, T47D, BT474, MDA-MB-231 and MDA-MB 468), 5 normal breast and 2 testis tissues was studied by Real Time RT-PCR reaction. The reference genes phosphoglucomutase 1 and hypoxanthine guanine phosphoribosyl transferase were used as reactions normalizers. The software tool REST 2009 was applied for statistical analysis of the data. The research was conducted from Apr 2014 to August 2015 in Faculty of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
All of the studied breast cancer cell lines showed very high levels of SYCP3 overexpression in comparison to normal breast (P=0.001) and even to normal testis (P=0.001), except for MCF7 cell line. Breast tumors showed moderately increasing in transcript changes in comparison to normal breast.
SYCP3 is a known testis-specific gene, but interestingly five out of six studied breast cancer of cell lines showed higher expression levels of SYCP3 in comparison to normal testis and normal breast tissues. SYCP3 has critical role in cell division with known interaction with the tumor suppressor genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are critical genes in breast cancer.