Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hsieh, J C
• Kodjabachian, L
• Rebbert, M L
• Rattner, A
• Smallwood, P M
• Samos, C H
• Nusse, R
• Dawid, I B
• Nathans, J

Titel

A new secreted protein that binds to Wnt proteins and inhibits their activities

Ist Teil von

• Nature (London), 1999-04, Vol.398 (6726), p.431-436

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

1999

Quelle

Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Wnt proteins constitute a large family of extracellular signalling molecules that are found throughout the animal kingdom and are important for a wide variety of normal and pathological developmental processes. Here we describe Wnt-inhibitory factor-1 (WIF-1), a secreted protein that binds to Wnt proteins and inhibits their activities. WIF-1 is present in fish, amphibia and mammals, and is expressed during Xenopus and zebrafish development in a complex pattern that includes paraxial presomitic mesoderm, notochord, branchial arches and neural crest derivatives. We use Xenopus embryos to show that WIF-1 overexpression affects somitogenesis (the generation of trunk mesoderm segments), in agreement with its normal expression in paraxial mesoderm. In vitro, WIF-1 binds to Drosophila Wingless and Xenopus Wnt8 produced by Drosophila S2 cells. Together with earlier results obtained with the secreted Frizzled-related proteins, our results indicate that Wnt proteins interact with structurally diverse extracellular inhibitors, presumably to fine-tune the spatial and temporal patterns of Wnt activity.