<p>MiR-34a Inhibits Cell Proliferation and Induces Apoptosis in Human Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma by Targeting lncRNA MCM3AP-AS1</p>

Abstract

Introduction: MCM3AP-AS1 has been characterized as an oncogenic lncRNA in several types of cancer, while its role in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is unknown. This study aimed to investigate the role of MCM3AP-AS1 in NPC. Patients and Methods: Paired NPC tissues and non-tumor tissues were collected from 55 NPC patients. Expression of MCM3AP-AS1 and miR-34a in paired tissues was analyzed by RT-qPCR. Interactions between MCM3AP-AS1 and miR-34a were analyzed by overexpression experiments. The roles of MCM3AP-AS1 and miR-34a in regulating NPC cell proliferation and apoptosis were explored by cell proliferation assay and cell apoptosis assay, respectively. Results: Our bioinformatics analysis showed that MCM3AP-AS1 may be targeted by miR-34a, which is a well-studied tumor suppressor miRNA. In this study, we showed that miR-34a was downregulated and MCM3AP-AS1 was upregulated in NPC. An inverse correlation between the expression of MCM3AP-AS1 and miR-34a was found across NPC tissue samples. High expression level of MCM3AP-AS1 and low levels of miR-34a in NPC tissues predicted the poor survival. In NPC cells, overexpression of MCM3AP-AS1 did not affect the expression of miR34a, while overexpression of miR-34a led to downregulated MCM3AP-AS1. Cell proliferation and apoptosis assay showed that overexpression of miR-34a reduced the enhancing effects of overexpressing MCM3AP-AS1 on cell proliferation and the inhibitory effects on cell apoptosis. Conclusion: MiR-34a inhibits cell proliferation and induces apoptosis in human NPC by targeting MCM3AP-AS1.

MCM3AP-AS1: An Indispensable Cancer-Related LncRNA

“…MCM3AP-AS1 was also found to be upregulated in Burkitt lymphoma, glioblastoma, LC, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, clear cell renal cell carcinoma, pancreatic cancer, and papillary thyroid cancer tissues compared to the corresponding normal tissues (Yang et al, 2017(Yang et al, , 2019Liang et al, 2019;Guo et al, 2020;Li et al, 2020b;Qiu et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2020) In contrast to the above findings, MCM3AP-AS1 expression is markedly downregulated in CSCC tissue samples and predicts a poor outcome. Overexpression of MCM3AP-AS1 reduces CSCC cell proliferation, and MCM3AP-AS1 acts as a tumor suppressor during CSCC development and progression.…”

“…In conclusion, MCM3AP-AS1 expression was markedly elevated in breast cancer (Chen et al, 2020;Riahi et al, 2021), Burkitt lymphoma (Guo et al, 2020), gastric cancer (Wang et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2021), glioblastoma (Yang et al, 2017), HCC (Wang et al, 2019e), LC (Li et al, 2020b), nasopharyngeal carcinoma (Sun et al, 2020), pancreatic cancer (Yang et al, 2019), papillary thyroid cancer (Liang et al, 2019), and PCa (Li et al, 2020a;Wu et al, 2020). However, MCM3AP-AS1 expression was downregulated in CSCC patients (Lan et al, 2020) (Table 1).…”

“…Silencing of MCM3AP-AS1 suppresses KPNA4 expression to impair cell proliferation by acting as a sponge of miR-340-5p in LC (Li et al, 2020b). MCM3AP-AS1 does not affect the levels of miR-34a, whereas elevated miR-34a expression suppresses cell proliferation by downregulating MCM3AP-AS1 expression in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (Sun et al, 2020). Silencing MCM3AP-AS1 expression inhibits cell proliferation and colony formation by regulating the miR-138-5p/FOXK1 axis in pancreatic cancer (Yang et al, 2019) and plays the same role by controlling the miR-211-5p/SPARC pathway in papillary thyroid cancer (Liang et al, 2019).…”

Long non‑coding RNA CASC9/microRNA‑590‑3p axis participates in lutein‑mediated suppression of breast cancer cell proliferation

“…miRNAs are short RNAs with a length of 20–25 nucleotides ( 39 ). They can inhibit or degrade their target mRNAs by binding to the 3′non-coding region of their target gene mRNA ( 18 , 19 ). It has been reported that miRNAs are involved in a series of important processes, such as tumor proliferation, invasion and migration ( 40 , 41 ).…”

“…Recent studies have reported that non-coding RNAs, such as long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs/miRs), play important roles in the development and progression of tumors (12)(13)(14). lncRNAs and miRNAs can influence the development of tumors by regulating physiological processes, such as cell proliferation and migration, apoptosis and autophagy (15)(16)(17)(18)(19). To the best of our knowledge, previous studies have not investigated whether lncRNAs and miRNAs enhance or affect the anticancer activity of lutein on breast cancer cells.…”