BIR-1, a homologue of human Survivin, is a protein that is expressed during embryonic development and in dividing cells and is highly expressed in most if not all cancers. In C. elegans,
bir-1 is expressed from an operon together with transcription and splicing cofactor SKIP,
skp-1, and is also expressed in nondividing cells. We have previously shown, that BIR-1 has developmental regulatory functions and has potential to augment thyroid hormone dependent transcription in an heterologous transfection system. Using whole genome microarrays (Affymetrix) analysis of gene expression in synchronized L1 larvae treated with
bir-1 RNAi, we identified genes whose expression is sensitive to BIR-1. Genes that were inhibited by
bir-1 RNAi included developmentally active collagen genes and ribosomal proteins and their expression was strongly augmented by overexpression of
bir-1 in transgenic lines. Our data show that BIR-1 regulates expression of specific genes and has potential to dramatically change the expression profile if overexpressed. We started initial experiments to characterize the effect of
bir-1 overexpression on proteome using comparative two dimensional chromatography and mass spectroscopy. Acknowledgement: We thank Drs. A. Fire for vectors and host used in RNAi, J.E. Rall and M.W. Krause for support and advice. We thank the NIDDK Microarrays facility for performing the microarrays analysis. The work was supported by the grant 301/05/0859 and 304/07/0529 from the Czech Science Foundation and by the grant 0021620806 from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic.