Long non‐coding RNA SCARNA2 induces cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma progression via modulating miR‐342‐3p expression

Abstract

Background: Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play important roles in the progression of tumors. However, the function and expression of SCARNA2 in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) is still unreported. Methods: A quantitative polymerase chain reaction was applied to study the expression of SCARNA2 and miR-342-3p. Cell counting kit-8, flow cytometry and transwell assays were performed to study cell growth, cycle and cell invasion. Results: We found that SCARNA2 expression is up-regulated in cSCC cell lines and SCARNA2 expression is higher in cSCC tissues than in adjacent non-tumor specimens. Ectopic expression of SCARNA2 promoted cell growth, cell cycle and invasion in SCC13 cells. In addition, the data indicate that miR-342-3p expression is downregulated in cSCC cell lines and miR-342-3p is down-regulated in cSCC tissues compared to adjacent non-tumor specimens. We showed that the SCARNA2 expression is negatively associated with miR-342-3p in cSCC. Moreover, we noted that SCARNA2 sponges miR-342-3p expression in cSCC cells. Overexpression of SCARNA2 suppressed the miR-342-3p expressed in SCC13 cells. We found that elevated expression of SCARNA2 promotes cell growth, cell cycle and invasion via regulating miR-342-3p expression in SCC13 cells. Conclusions: These data suggest that SCARNA2 acts in an oncogenic role and may be a potential target for cSCC.

Comprehensive Pan-Cancer Analysis of the Prognostic and Immunological Roles of the METTL3/lncRNA-SNHG1/miRNA-140-3p/UBE2C Axis

“…Furthermore, Zhang et al showed that SCARNA2 mediates colorectal cancer chemoresistance through interaction with mirR-342-3p ( Zhang et al, 2019 ). Ma et al showed that SCARNA2 induces cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma progression by regulating miR-342-3p expression ( Zhang et al, 2020 ). Previous studies have shown that METTL3 methylated SOX2 transcripts, subsequently recognized by the specific m6A “reader” and insulin-like growth factor 2 mRNA-binding protein 2 (IGF2BP2), to maintain SOX2 stability and promote colorectal carcinoma progression ( Li et al, 2019 ).…”

MicroRNA-573 inhibits cell proliferation, migration and invasion and is downregulated by PICSAR in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma

“…LncRNAs are defined as non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) over 200 nucleotides in length and can regulate gene expression at epigenetic, transcriptional, and posttranscriptional levels [ 6 ]. In addition, some lncRNAs have been increasingly recognized to be involved in the progression of cSCC, such as lncRNA TINCR [30993776] and lncRNA SCARNA 2 [ 7 ]. The important role of lncRNA PICSAR in cSCC has been reported by previous studies.…”

Pseudogenes and Liquid Phase Separation in Epigenetic Expression

“…The findings reveal that the overexpression of scaRNA2 competes with miR-342-3p by ending up with the high expression of epidermal growth factor receptor, leading to colorectal cancer chemo-resistance (68). Increased expression of scaRNA2 also promotes cell proliferation, migration, and invasion in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (69).…”