Gene expression profiling of three human prostate epithelial subpopulations

The human prostate epithelium is predominantly comprised of two cell-types: basal and luminal. While basal cells exhibit significant progenitor activity in a variety of functional assays, luminal cells are depleted of this activity. Recent studies indicate that approximately 1% of luminal cells exhibit progenitor activity. We have discovered that differential expression of the glycoprotein CD38 can fractionate the luminal population into two subsets: CD38+ and CD38-low. In functional assays, the CD38-low luminal cells exhibit roughly 5-fold increased progenitor activity compared to the remaining CD38+ population. Therefore, we propose that CD38-low luminal cells represent an enriched luminal progenitor population while the CD38+ subset is predominantly comprised of mature non-progenitor luminal cells.

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Liu X, Grogan TR, Hieronymus H, Hashimoto T, Mottahedeh J, Cheng D, Zhang L, Huang K, Stoyanova T, Park JW, Shkhyan RO, Nowroozizadeh B, Rettig MB, Sawyers CL, Elashoff D, Horvath S, Huang J, Witte ON, Goldstein AS