Emerging Roles of m6A RNA Methylation Regulators in Gynecological Cancer

Abstract

Gynecological cancers seriously affect the reproductive system of females; diseases include ovarian tumors, uterine tumors, endometrial cancers, cervical cancers, and vulva and vaginal tumors. At present, the diagnosis methods of gynecological cancer are insufficiently sensitive and specific, leading to failure of early disease detection. N6-methyladenosine (m6A) plays various biological functions in RNA modification and is currently studied extensively. m6A modification controls the fate of transcripts and regulates RNA metabolism and biological processes through the interaction of m6A methyltransferase (“writer”) and demethylase (“erasers”) and the binding protein decoding m6A methylation (“readers”). In the field of epigenetics, m6A modification is a dynamic process of reversible regulation of target RNA through its regulatory factors. It plays an important role in many diseases, especially cancer. However, its role in gynecologic cancers has not been fully investigated. Thus, we review the regulatory mechanism, biological functions, and therapeutic prospects of m6A RNA methylation regulators in gynecological cancers.

The Role of m6A RNA Methylation in Cancer: Implication for Nature Products Anti-Cancer Research

“…More recently, extensive efforts have been made to investigate the biological effects of dysregulated m6A modifications and related mechanisms (i.e., m6A writers, erasers, and reader proteins) in various cancers, such as prostate cancer ( Wang et al, 2022 ), colorectal cancer ( Tanabe et al, 2016 ; Zhu et al, 2020b ), gastric cancer ( Xu et al, 2021 ), esophageal cancer ( Guo et al, 2020 ), cervical cancer and endometrial cancer ( Zhang and Yang, 2021 ; Huang et al, 2022 ), pancreatic cancer ( Li et al, 2021 ), skin cancer ( Yang et al, 2021 ), etc. Moreover, METTL16, as an independent regulator, plays an important role in RNA m6A modification.…”

Potential Impact of N6-Methyladenosine RNA Methylation on Vision Function and the Pathological Processes of Ocular Diseases: New Discoveries and Future Perspectives

“…Many studies have shown that m6A modifications are characteristic of tumor development. Remarkably, the m6A modification patterns in the pathogenesis of tumors, such as uveal melanoma [42,73,321], retinoblastoma [317], and glioblastoma [322,323], female reproductive system cancers [324], acute myeloid leukemia [325], breast cancer [326], prostate cancer [327], liver cancer [57,328], lung cancer [329], pancreatic cancer [330], colorectal cancer [331], kidney cancer [332], and gastric cancer [333] are highly variable. The role of m6A modifications in cancer genesis is controversial.…”

The roles of RNA N6-methyladenosine in esophageal cancer

“…m 6 A-binding proteins mainly include YT521-B homology (YTH) domain-containing proteins (YTHDC1, YTHDC2, YTHDF1, YTHDF2 and YTHDF3), heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein (hnRNP) family members (hnRNPA2/B1, hnRNPC and hnRNPG), FXR family members, IGF2BP family members, eIF family members and G3BPs family members [ 26 , 38 ]. The main characteristic of m 6 A-binding proteins is that they all have a conserved m 6 A-binding domain and bind to the RRm6ACH sequence [ 39 , 40 ].…”