The 6th International p63/p73 Workshop was a coming home of sorts, back to the country where p63 had been discovered, Japan. It was held in Chiba at the Kazusa Akademia Park, from 15 to 18 September 2013, with 34 oral and 32 poster presentations. A pre-conference programme preluded the workshop with 11-oral presentations by young Japanese fellows. In general, this year’s workshop continued to highlight the complex and diverse roles of the p63 and p73 proteins, and also touched upon the therapeutic possibilities in pathological conditions where these proteins are altered. Major work presented at the workshop are highlighted under specific themes, as follows.

Many presentations, as in the last workshop, were focused on understanding the role of p63 and p73 in various developmental processes. As summarised in Table 1, majority of these were on TAp63/DNp63, compared with TAp73. An emerging theme from these presentations was that both p63 and p73 have common critical roles in the regulation of metabolism, thereby having an effect on senescence and aging, as well as neurogenesis and cognition. In the former case, TAp73 appears to have an anti-senescence role, as a loss of TAp73 led to decreased O2 flux and consumption, most likely due to mitochondrial dysfunction, suggesting a role in metabolism. Consistently, serine biosynthesis was reported to be negatively regulated by TAp73, and on the contrary, positively by DNp73. The net response therefore was that absence of TAp73 led to aging and senescence, which were correlated with elevated p16 and p19 levels. Although the role of p63 in senescence has been previously reported, TAp63−/− mice were shown to develop glucose intolerance and develop insulin resistance, involving TAp63-mediated regulation of AMPK, Sirt1 and so on, thereby regulating the fatty acid synthesis and the decreased fatty acid oxidation. DNp63-mediated regulation of hexokinase 2 was also reported to control mitochondrial basal respiration and intracellular ROS. Altogether, these presentations alluded to a collective role of p63 and p73 in regulating various aspects of metabolism.

Table 1 Non-cancer-related functions of p63/p73 reported in the workshop are summarised
Full size table

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