NF-IL6, a member of the C/EBP family of transcription factors, binds and trans-activates the human MDR1 gene promoter.

Revealing the regulatory mechanisms involved in P-glycoprotein expression is important to our understanding of multidrug resistance (MDR) in tumor cells. The MDR1 gene encoding P-glycoprotein contained a promoter sequence (-157 to -125) that was found to be homologous with other mdr gene promoters and that specifically interacted with a nuclear protein. The nuclear protein was identified, using a HeLa lambda gt11 cDNA expression library, to be the transcriptional regulator nuclear factor for interleukin-6 (NF-IL6), a member of the C/EBP family of transcription factors that bound an NF-IL-6-like consensus element 5'-TTTCGCAGT-3'. Furthermore, a glutathione S-transferase fusion protein (10.1-glutathione S-transferase) containing the partial NF-IL6 cDNA was also found to specifically interact with the MDR1 promoter sequence. Co-transfection of an NF-IL6 expression vector with a chloramphenicol acetyltransferase reporter gene driven by 1018 base pairs of MDR1 5'-flanking sequences demonstrated that NF-IL6 trans-activated the MDR1 promoter. This trans-activation was significantly reduced when the NF-IL6 element in the reporter gene construct was deleted or mutated. Identification of NF-IL6 as an important transcriptional regulator and the implications of its potential role in MDR1 gene induction in response to a variety of stimuli are discussed.