MICoA, a novel metastasis-associated protein 1 (MTA1) interacting protein coactivator, regulates estrogen receptor-alpha transactivation functions.

The transcriptional activity of estrogen receptor-alpha (ER-alpha) is modified by coactivators, corepressors, and chromatin remodeling complexes. We have previously shown that the metastasis-associated protein-1 (MTA1), a component of histone deacetylase and nucleosome remodeling complexes, represses ER-driven transcription by recruiting histone deacetylases to the estrogen receptor element (ERE)-containing target gene chromatin in breast cancer cells. Using a yeast two-hybrid screening to clone MTA1-interacting proteins, we identified a previously uncharacterized molecule, which we named as MTA1-interacting coactivator (MICoA). Our findings suggest that estrogen signaling promotes nuclear translocation of MICoA and that MICoA interacts with MTA1 both in vitro and in vivo. MICoA binds to the C-terminal region of MTA1, whereas MTA1 binds to the N-terminal MICoA containing one nuclear receptor interaction LSRLL motif. We showed that MICoA is an ER coactivator, cooperates with other ER coactivators, stimulates ER-transactivation functions, and associates with the endogenous ER and its target gene promoter chromatin. MTA1 also repressed MICoA-mediated stimulation of ERE-mediated transcription in the presence of ER and ER variants with naturally occurring mutations, such as D351Y and K303R, and that it interfered with the association of MICoA with the ER-target gene chromatin. Because chromatin is a highly dynamic structure and because MTA1 and MICoA could be detected within the same complex, these findings suggest that MTA1 and MICoA might transmodulate functions of each other and any potential deregulation of MTA1 is likely to contribute to the functional inactivation of the ER pathway, presumably by derecruitment of MICoA from ER target promoter chromatin.