The role of Smchd1 in cancer
Our previous work identified Smchd1 as a novel gene critically involved in X inactivation: the silencing of one of the two X chromosomes in female mammals to achieve dosage compensation between females and males. Smchd1 is a very large chromosomal protein and functions as a transcriptional repressor. Smchd1 has some homology to the SMC proteins that are involved in chromosome cohesion and condensation during cell division and DNA repair. Given that many epigenetic modifiers are aberrantly expressed in cancer, we are testing the role of Smchd1 in several models of cancer, using both our 2 null alleles of Smchd1 and retroviral knockdown approaches.