Assignment<footref rid="foot01">¹</footref> of the chicken <i>NOV</i> gene (alias CCN3) to chromosome 2q34→q36: Conserved and compared synteny between avian, mouse and human

The nephroblastomas induced by the integration of MAV1(N) (avian myeloblastosis-associated virus type 1 N) (Perbal et al., 1985; Soret et al., 1989) in the chicken genome was found to be an attractive model for the study of genes responsible for initiation and establishment of the human pediatric Wilms tumor (Perbal, 1995). Screening of lambda libraries of tumor DNAs allowed us to discover the NOV (nephroblastoma overexpressed) gene (Joliot et al., 1992) whose expression was found to be altered both in avian and human nephroblastomas (Chevalier et al., 1998). The NOV protein belongs to the CCN family of multimodular secreted regulators of cell growth (for a recent review see Perbal, 2001). In normal conditions its expression is associated with polarized differentiation of several different tissues. In human tumors, increased expression of NOV is either a marker of heterotypic differentiation (Chevalier et al., 1998) or associated with increased tumorigenic potential (Manara et al., 2002). Recently, NOV was reported to act as a tumor suppressor in glioblastoma cells (Gupta et al., 2001). The human NOV homolog was previously assigned to human chromosome 8q24 (Martinerie et al., 1992). In the framework of our continued study of the MAV1-(N) integration sites, we report here the localization of the chicken NOV gene on chicken chromosome 2q by fluorescent in situ hybridization. Materials and methods