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Abstract
The chemokine receptor CXCR4 is a member of the large family of 7 transmembrane domain receptors coupled to heterotrimeric Gi proteins.
Its ligand, the CXC chemokine stromal cell-derived factor 1 (SDF-1), also named CXCL12, activates multiple signal transduction pathways.
CXCR4 emerges as a new stem cell marker and SDF-1 seems to be one of the most important chemoattractants for CXCR4+ NSC (normal stem cells).CXCR4 could be potentially employed in addition to other antigens (e.g., Sca-1 in mice or CD133 in humans) as a marker to identify/isolate both NSC from normal tissues, as well as CSC (cancer stem cells) from growing solid tumors or leukemias.
The expression of CXCR4 on malignant cells directly implies that the SDF-1–CXCR4 axis may influence the biology of cancer and play a pivotal role in directing the metastasis of CXCR4+ tumor cells by chemoattracting them to organs that highly express SDF-1 (e.g., lymph nodes, lungs, liver or bones