Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 14|pp 14219—14231

Decreased lncRNA, TINCR, promotes growth of colorectal carcinoma through upregulating microRNA-31

Zhong Ren¹, Jingzheng Liu¹, Jian Li¹, Liqing Yao¹

¹Endoscopy Center, Endoscopy Research Institute, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai 200032, China

* Equal contribution

Received: January 20, 2020Accepted: April 17, 2020Published: July 17, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Ren 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

Abnormal expression in terminal differentiation-induced noncoding RNA (TINCR), a long non-coding RNA (lncRNA), has been reported in different human cancers, including colorectal carcinoma (CRC). Moreover, the molecular mechanisms that underlie the effects of TINCR on CRC remain unclear. Here, by a set of bioinformatics studies, we found that microRNA-31 (miR-31), the oncogenic miRNA that robustly upregulates in CRC, was a sponge miRNA for TINCR. TINCR and miR-31 levels were inversely correlated in both CRC tissues and CRC cell lines. Luciferase reporter assay revealed a specific binding site on TINCR for miR-31. Suppression of TINCR promoted CRC cell growth and migration in vitro, while overexpression of TINCR inhibited CRC cell growth and migration in vitro. TINCR depletion increased tumor xenograft growth in vivo, while TINCR overexpression inhibited it. Together, our study suggests that re-expressing TINCR may suppress invasive outgrowth of CRC through miR-31.