 Protein-coding gene in the species Homo sapiens |
Transcription factor RFX4 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the RFX4 gene.567
This gene is a member of the regulatory factor X gene family, which encodes transcription factors that contain a highly conserved winged helix DNA binding domain. The protein encoded by this gene is structurally related to regulatory factors X1, X2, X3, and X5. It has been shown to interact with itself as well as with regulatory factors X2 and X3, but it does not interact with regulatory factor X1. This protein may be a transcriptional repressor rather than a transcriptional activator. Three transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been described for this gene.7
RFX4 has been implicated in neural-lineage specification and in glioblastoma cell-state control: pooled transcription-factor overexpression with single-cell RNA-seq identified RFX4 as sufficient to induce neural progenitor–like programs from human pluripotent stem cells that differentiate toward CNS neuron and glia lineages,8 and in glioblastoma, RFX4 was reported as an orchestrator of growth and differentiation in diffusely invading tumor cells, where perturbation redistributed invasion routes and extended survival in xenografts.