BNIP3 and central nervous system cancer: We have previously identified that BNIP3 is expressed in the nucleus of primary human astrocytes and glioma cell lines, and it transcriptionally represses the expression of AIF.28 To further characterize genes transcriptionally repressed by BNIP3, we conducted Affymetrix oligonucleotide microarray analysis on total RNA from U251 and U251shRNABNIP3 cells on Affymetrix GeneChip Human U133 Plus 2.0 microarray chips.