Genetic mutation of p53, which monitors DNA damage and operates cellular checkpoints, is a major factor in the development of human malignancies. A novel gene p63/p73L/p51, encoding a protein with significant homology to p53 and p73, was recently identified at 3q27-9. To investigate the penetration of p63 in cervical carcinogenesis, mutation and transcription analyses of p63 were performed in cervical carcinoma. A certain isotype of p63 called TAp63gamma encodes the acidic N-terminus and possesses a short C-terminus. Using reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction-single strand conformation polymorphism (RT-PCR-SSCP) analysis for TAp63gamma, one mutation was found in the cervical carcinoma cell line SKG-I. However, no mutations causing amino acid substitutions or frameshifts were found in 54 cases examined for TAp63gamma, which is thought to be a tumor suppressor gene. While cervical carcinomas tended to yield a positive signal in the RT-PCR reaction designed to amplify transcripts encoding the acidic N-terminus, normal cervix and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) did not express this transcript. These data suggest that the p63 gene does not play an essential role as a tumor suppressor gene, but expression of TAp63gamma may be speculatively associated with tumor growth in cervical carcinogenesis.

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