Disease relevance of Bcan

• Brevican increases the invasiveness of glioma cells in vivo and has been suggested to play a role in central nervous system fiber tract development [1].
• Phage clones containing the complete mouse brevican open reading frame of 2649 bp and the complete 3'-untranslated region of 341 bp were isolated from a mouse brain cDNA library, and cosmid clones containing the mouse brevican gene were isolated from a genomic library using a PCR-generated DNA fragment as probe [2].

High impact information on Bcan

• Brevican-deficient mice display impaired hippocampal CA1 long-term potentiation but show no obvious deficits in learning and memory [1].
• Brevican is a brain-specific proteoglycan which is found in specialized extracellular matrix structures called perineuronal nets [1].
• Lesion-induced differential expression and cell association of Neurocan, Brevican, Versican V1 and V2 in the mouse dorsal root entry zone [3].
• In addition, Brevican was transiently expressed by reactive oligodendrocytes, and by a subset of astrocytes thereafter [3].
• A complete cDNA encoding the Xenopus laevis homologue of the aggrecan/versican family member, brevican (Xbcan) was cloned from an embryonic stage 42 cDNA library [4].

Biological context of Bcan

• Single strand conformation polymorphism analysis mapped the brevican gene (Bcan) to chromosome 3 between the microsatellite markers D3Mit22 and D3Mit11 [2].
• The obtained genomic sequence of 13,700 nucleotides revealed that the murine gene has a size of approximately 13 kb and contains the sequence of the mRNA for the secreted brevican isoform on 14 exons [2].
• Xenopus brevican is expressed in the notochord and the brain during early embryogenesis [4].

Anatomical context of Bcan

• Evidence for proteolytic cleavage of brevican by the ADAMTSs in the dentate gyrus after excitotoxic lesion of the mouse entorhinal cortex [5].
• The purpose of these experiments was to determine whether the production of brevican or the ADAMTS-cleaved fragments of brevican were altered after deafferentation and reinnervation of the dentate gyrus via entorhinal cortex lesion (ECL) [5].

Associations of Bcan with chemical compounds

• Neurocan and brevican are related chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans which are mainly expressed in the central nervous system [6].
• Interaction studies of mouse brain proteoglycans revealed that neurocan, but not brevican, was retained on a heparin affinity matrix [6].

Other interactions of Bcan

• Further, an almost quadruple knockout like extracellular environment was noticed in the brains of triple knockout mice lacking both tenascins and brevican, since these brains had strongly reduced levels of neurocan [7].
• These patterns were also seen after immunoreaction for chondroitin proteoglycan domains, brevican and phosphacan, as well as after detection of hyaluronan and tenascin-R [8].
• No consensus TATA sequence was found upstream of the first exon, and RNase protection experiments revealed multiple transcriptional start sites for the brevican gene [2].

Analytical, diagnostic and therapeutic context of Bcan

• Molecular cloning of Bral2, a novel brain-specific link protein, and immunohistochemical colocalization with brevican in perineuronal nets [9].

References