Forced overexpression of the intracellular domain of NOTCH2 (N2ICD) induced cell growth and invasion by cell-cycle progression, maintenance of stemness and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT).
The results showed that upregulating Notch2 had the effect of suppressing cell growth and invasion as well as inducing apoptosis, just the same as the results of knocking down Notch1.
Down-regulation of Notch2 by siRNA enhanced tumor cell invasion (100.00% ± 21.64% vs 162.22% ± 16.84%, P < 0.05) and expression of MMP9 (1.56 fold, P < 0.05), and activated the pro-MMP9 protein to its active form (1.48 fold, P < 0.05).