Expression of lipid transport‐associated genes in lipid‐deprived cancer cells

Abstract

Genes to Cells | INTRODUCTIONCancer cells are known to modulate their de novo lipid synthesis pathway in response to changes in extracellular lipid availability (Daniëls et al., 2014;Munir et al., 2019). It has been observed that the expression of genes involved in de novo lipid synthesis is differentially modulated in cancer cells under low-lipid environment (Daniëls et al., 2014). We have recently shown that under lipid-deprived environment, the lipidomic profiles of cancer cells are largely altered (Munir et al., 2019). Moreover, cellular lipid load is also significantly reduced under such conditions (Munir et al., 2019). Multiple works have studied the modulation of de novo lipid synthesis in metabolically stressed cancer cells (Munir et al., 2019); however, genes associated with lipid transport are not widely investigated in this regard. Cellular lipid homeostasis is immensely altered under lipiddeprived conditions, and there is possibility that lipid transport proteins (LTPs) also play a role in this phenomenon. Lipids are distributed to different cellular membranes via vesicular or nonvesicular cellular lipid trafficking processes (Levine, 2004).Nonvesicular transport-that constitutes the bulk of lipid traffic-is mediated by LTPs, which transfer a small number of lipids at the same time using hydrophobic cavities that stabilize lipid molecules outside membranes (Wong et al., 2019). In addition, many species of LTPs function as second messengers in key signaling pathways that control cell survival, proliferation, and migration. Previous works have implicated LTPs in cancer-associated signal transduction cascades. Recent works suggest that LTPs play an important role in cancer progression and metastasis (reviewed in (Peretti et al., 2019)). The aim of the presented work was to study the expression of LTP genes under lipid-reduced environment and to identify the common genes that are up-or down-regulated under such conditions in a panel of biologically diverse cancer cell lines. | RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONFor the presented work we selected a biologically diverse panel of cancer cell lines -two prostate cancer cell lines