Anti-RAR alpha

Retinoid signaling is transduced by 2 families of nuclear receptors, retinoic acid receptor (RAR) and retinoid X receptor (RXR; see MIM 180245), which form RXR/RAR heterodimers. In the absence of ligand, DNA-bound RXR/RARA represses transcription by recruiting the corepressors NCOR1 (MIM 600849), SMRT (NCOR2; MIM 600848), and histone deacetylase (see MIM 601241). When ligand binds to the complex, it induces a conformational change allowing the recruitment of coactivators, histone acetyltransferases (see MIM 603053), and the basic transcription machinery. Translocations that always involve rearrangement of the RARA gene are a cardinal feature of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL; MIM 612376). The most frequent translocation is t(15,17)(q21;q22), which fuses the RARA gene with the PML gene (MIM 102578) (Vitoux et al., 2007 [PubMed 17468032]).