IMR Press / FBL / Volume 9 / Issue 2 / DOI: 10.2741/1355

Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.

Article
Bone morphogenetic protein-3 family members and their biological functions
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1 Department of Biochemistry, National Cardiovascular Center Research Institute, Suita, Osaka 565-8565, Japan
2 Department of Molecular Biology, Kawasaki Medical School, Kurashiki, Okayama 701-0192, Japan
Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2004, 9(2), 1520–1529; https://doi.org/10.2741/1355
Published: 1 May 2004
Abstract

Bone morphogenetic protein-3 and 3b (BMP-3 and BMP-3b) together represent a unique subgroup of the BMP family. BMP-3b shares 82% amino acid identity with BMP-3 in the mature region (ligand domain), but only 37% in the pro-region (pro-domain). In osteoblasts, BMP-3 and 3b have similar antagonistic activity against BMP-2, but they are differentially regulated. In developing embryos, BMP-3 and 3b have different dorsalizing activities. BMP-3b triggers secondary head formation in an autonomous manner, whereas BMP-3 induces aberrant tail formation. Loss-of-function analysis demonstrates that coordinated activity of xBMP-3b and cerberus, a head inducer, are required for head formation in Xenopus embryos. At the molecular level, BMP-3b antagonizes both nodal-like proteins (Xnr1 and derriere) and ventralizing BMPs (BMP-2 and ADMP), whereas BMP-3 only antagonizes ventralizing BMPs. Moreover, BMP-3b, but not BMP-3, associates with the monomeric form of Xnr1, a nodal-like protein. These molecular features of BMP-3 and 3b are due to their distinct pro-regions. These findings suggest that the processing of precursor regions and assembly of BMP-3 and 3b are important in various developmental processes and organogenesis.

Keywords
BMP-3
Osteogenin
BMP-3b
GDF-10
TGFß
Osteogenic activity
Osteoblast
ALPase
dorsalizing activity
Cerberus
Head formation
Neural inducer
Precursor processing
Embryos
Review
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