Aging
Navigate
Submit an Article
Research Paper|Volume 10, Issue 8|pp 2113—2121

MiR-146b inhibits autophagy in prostate cancer by targeting the PTEN/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway

Song Gao1, Zhiying Zhao2, Rong Wu1, Lina Wu1, Xin Tian1, Zhenyong Zhang1
  • 1The Second Department of Clinical Oncology, Shengjing Hospital, China Medical University, Shenyang 110022, China
  • 2School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110004, China
Received: June 25, 2018Accepted: August 17, 2018Published: August 27, 2018
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101534

Copyright: © 2018 Gao 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

Prostate cancer (PCa) is considered as a common visceral cancer in males and the sixth major cause of cancer-related deaths in males worldwide. Significant diagnostic and therapeutic advances have been made in the past decades. However, an improved understanding of their molecular mechanism is still needed. In the present research, we first detected the expression of miR-146b by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) and found that miR-146b expression was increased in PCa. Subsequently, we found that miR-146b play an important role in the viability and proliferation capacity of PCa cells functionally. To explore the mechanism, we performed western blot to examine the autophagy-related markers, and found that miR‑146b may inhibit autophagy in PCa cells via activation of PTEN/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway. Furthermore, we performed the dual luciferase reporter assay to clarify the relationship between miR-146b and PTEN. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that miR-146b inhibited autophagy in PCa by targeting the PTEN/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway, and it could be a potential candidate for application in the treatment of PCa.