ToxSci Advance Access published online on July 2, 2009
Toxicological Sciences, doi:10.1093/toxsci/kfp144
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dioxin increases the interaction between aryl hydrocarbon receptor and estrogen receptor alpha at human promoters


* Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A8
The Bioinformatics Centre, Department of Biology & Biotech Research and Innovation Centre, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Address correspondence to: Jason Matthews, Ph.D., University of Toronto, Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, Medical Sciences Building, Room 4336, 1 King's College Circle, Toronto, ON Canada, M5S 1A8, Phone: 416-946-0852, Fax: 416-978-2723, E-mail: jason.matthews{at}utoronto.ca
Received May 19, 2009; revision received June 26, 2009; accepted June 27, 2009
| Abstract |
|---|
Recent studies have shown that activated aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) induced the recruitment of estrogen receptor
(ER
) to AHR-regulated genes and that AHR is recruited to ER
-regulated genes. However, these findings were limited to a small number of well characterized AHR or ER
responsive genes with little knowledge of what was occurring at other genomic regions. In this study we showed using chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by hybridization to promoter focused microarrays (ChIP-chip) that 2,3,7,8 -tetrachlorodibenzo–p-dioxin (TCDD) treatment significantly increased the overlap of genomic regions bound by both AHR and ER
. Conventional and sequential ChIPs confirmed the recruitment of AHR and ER
to many of the identified regions. Transcription factor binding site analysis revealed an over-representation of AHREs (AHR response elements) in regions bound by both AHR and ER
, suggesting that AHR was the important factor determining the recruitment of ER
to these regions. RNAi-mediated knockdown of AHR confirmed its requirement for the recruitment of ER
to some, but not all, of the shared regions. Our findings demonstrate that dioxin induces the recruitment of ER
to AHR target genes but also that AHR is recruited to estrogen responsive regions in a gene-specific manner, suggesting that AHR utilizes both of these mechanisms to modulate estrogen dependent signaling.
Key Words: aryl hydrocarbon receptor; estrogen receptor
; ChIP-chip; receptor crosstalk; dioxin.