Vacuolar Protein Sorting 53 (VPS53)

VPS53 encodes a protein with sequence similarity to the yeast Vps53p protein. Vps53p is involved in retrograde vesicle trafficking in late Golgi.

HCCS1 was identified by both positional cloning from a predominant region of loss of heterozygosity in liver cancer and by functional screening for genes affecting cell proliferation in large-scale transfection assays. Its overexpression results in inhibition of cell proliferation in cell culture and tumor growth in nude mice. To understand its transcription regulation, the promoter architecture has been dissected in detail. The major start of transcription was mapped by primer extension to a C residue, 177 nucleotides upstream of the ATG codon.