Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 12 pp 11500—11516
Long noncoding RNA LINC00963 induces NOP2 expression by sponging tumor suppressor miR-542-3p to promote metastasis in prostate cancer
- 1 Department of Urology, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai 200080, China
Received: December 16, 2019 Accepted: March 30, 2020 Published: June 17, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103236How to Cite
Copyright © 2020 Sun 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
Metastatic disease caused by castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) is the principal cause of prostate cancer (PCa)-related mortality. CRPC occurs within 2–3 years of initiation of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), which is an important factor of influencing PCa metastasis. Recent studies have revealed that non-coding RNAs in PCa can enhance metastasis and progression, while the mechanisms are still unclear. In this study, we reported that the long noncoding RNA-LINC00963 was increased in CRPC tissues and promoted migration of PCa cells in vitro and their metastasis in vivo. High levels of LINC00963 significantly decreased tumor suppressor miR-542-3p, whose levels in metastasis tissues were low compared to those in non-metastasis tissues. LINC00963 promotes and miR-542-3p inhibits metastasis. Furthermore, the expression levels of LINC00963 and miR-542-3p were positively and negatively associated with the expression of NOP2. We demonstrated that NOP2 promoted PCa by activating the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) pathway. For specific mechanism, dual luciferase reporter assays showed that miR-542-3p directly binds to both 3'-untranslated region (UTR) of LINC00963 and NOP2 mRNA. Taken together, our results show that LINC00963 acts as an inducer of PCa metastasis by binding miR-542-3p, thereby promoting NOP2. This axis may have diagnostic and therapeutic potential for advanced PCa.