Aging
Navigate
Submit an Article
Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 1|pp 53—69

FHL3 promotes pancreatic cancer invasion and metastasis through preventing the ubiquitination degradation of EMT associated transcription factors

Pengping Li1,2, Guodong Cao2, Yuefeng Zhang4, Jingbo Shi2, Kailun Cai2, Lei Zhen2, Xiaobo He4, Yizhao Zhou2, Yongzhou Li2, Yi Zhu2, Maoming Xiong3, Yulian Wu2
  • 1The First People's Hospital of Xiaoshan Hangzhou, Zhejiang 311000, China
  • 2Department of Surgery, Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310000, China
  • 3Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, Department of General Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui 230000, China
  • 4Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430000, Hubei Province, China
* Equal contribution
Received: October 14, 2019Accepted: November 20, 2019Published: January 13, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102564

Copyright: © 2020 Li 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

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is intractable due to its strong invasiveness and metastatic ability. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is the pivotal driver of tumor invasion and metastasis. The four-and-a-half LIM domain (FHL) family is involved in regulating transforming growth factor (TGF)-β and Ras signaling, which might control the EMT process. In this study, we found that higher expression of four-and-a-half LIM domains 3 (FHL3) predicted poor prognosis in PDAC. The decreasing of FHL3 changed the EMT phenotype by blocking the TGFβ/Atk/GSK3β/ubiquitin pathways. Interestingly, the GSK3β inhibitor could abrogate the role of FHL3 in the regulation of snail1 and twist1 expression, which implied that GSK3β plays a pivotal role in the FHL3-mediated EMT process. Furthermore, we found that FHL3 can directly bind to GSK3β, which weakened the interaction between GSK3β and snail1/twist1. We also found that the LIM-3 domain of FHL3 was required for the binding of FHL3 to GSK3β. Collectively, our study implied that FHL3, as a binding partner of GSK3β, promoted tumor metastasis in PDAC through inhibiting the ubiquitin-degradation of snail1 and twist1.