Regulatory interaction of HNF1-alpha to microRNA-194 gene during intestinal epithelial cell differentiation.

Maintenance of intestinal epithelium is based on well-balanced molecular mechanisms that confer the stable and continuous supply of specialized epithelial cell lineages from multipotent progenitors. Lineage commitment decisions in intestinal epithelium system involve multiple regulatory systems that interplay each other to establish the cellular identities. Here, we demonstrate that the microRNA system could be involved in intestinal epithelial cell differentiation and that microRNA-194 (miR194) is highly induced during this process and controlled by a transcription factor, HNF-alpha, that is well known to regulate gene expression in intestinal epithelial cells. Thus, the 5' conserved genomic region of miR-1942 gene, the inducible class of miR-194 parental gene, contains a binding motif for HNF1-alpha. This consensus region is required for the transcription of miR-1942 and active in intestinal epithelial cell line, Caco-2, in-vivo. Our observations indicate that microRNA genes could be targets of lineage specific transcription factors and that microRNAs are regulated in intestinal epithelial cells in a tissue specific manner. Given that role of microRNA in fine tuning of gene expression patterns, our results suggest that HNF1-alpha regulates the gene expression program by not only direct activation of genes but also modulation through induction of microRNAs such as miR-194, in intestinal epithelial cells. This represents a novel molecular machinery that might specify the fates of intestinal epithelial cell lineages during their differentiation.