Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 10 pp 9745—9760
Loss of macroH2A1 decreases mitochondrial metabolism and reduces the aggressiveness of uveal melanoma cells
- 1 Department of Biomedical and Biotechnological Sciences, University of Catania, Catania, Italy
- 2 Center for Translational Medicine (CTM), International Clinical Research Center (FNUSA-ICRC), St Anne's University Hospital, Brno, Czech Republic
- 3 Department of Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
- 4 Department G.F. Ingrassia, Section of Anatomic Pathology, University of Catania, Catania, Italy
- 5 Department of Ophthalmology, University of Catania, Catania, Italy
- 6 UniCamillus-Saint Camillus International University of Health Sciences, Rome, Italy
- 7 EuroMediterranean Institute of Science and Technology, Palermo, Italy
Received: January 29, 2020 Accepted: March 31, 2020 Published: May 12, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103241How to Cite
Copyright © 2020 Giallongo et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Uveal melanoma (UM) is the most common primary intraocular tumour in adults. The most accurate prognostic factor of UM is classification by gene expression profiling. Currently, the role of epigenetics is much less defined compared to genetic mechanisms. We recently showed a strong prognostic role of the expression levels of histone variant macroH2A1 in UM patients. Here, we assessed the mechanistic effects of macroH2A1 on UM progression.
UM cell lines were stably knocked down (KD) for macroH2A1, and proliferation and colony formation capacity were evaluated. Mitochondrial function was assayed through qPCR and HPLC analyses. Correlation between mitochondrial gene expression and cancer aggressiveness was studied using a bioinformatics approach.
MacroH2A1 loss significantly attenuated UM cells proliferation and aggressiveness. Furthermore, genes involved in oxidative phosphorylation displayed a decreased expression in KD cells. Consistently, macroH2A1 loss resulted also in a significant decrease of mitochondrial transcription factor A (TFAM) expression, suggesting impaired mitochondrial replication. Bioinformatics analyses uncovered that the expression of genes involved in mitochondrial metabolism correlates with macroH2A1 and with cancer aggressiveness in UM patients. Altogether, our results suggest that macroH2A1 controls UM cells progression and it may represent a molecular target to develop new pharmacological strategies for UM treatment.