Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 18|pp 18209—18220

piR-19166 inhibits migration and metastasis through CTTN/MMPs pathway in prostate carcinoma

Tingyue Qi¹, Haiyan Cao¹, Hongguang Sun¹, Hao Feng¹, Nianfeng Li¹, Chenghai Wang², Lei Wang²

¹Department of Ultrasound, Medical Imaging Center, Affiliated Hospital of Yangzhou University, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225009, China
²Department of Pathology, Affiliated Hospital of Yangzhou University, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225009, China

* Co-first authors

Received: February 17, 2020Accepted: May 27, 2020Published: September 3, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Qi 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

Tumor metastasis is one of death causes for patients of prostate carcinoma. PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are a subtype of noncoding protein RNAs that are involved in tumorigenesis, but the effect of piRNAs in prostate carcinoma (PCa) remains unclear. This article showed the identification of piRNAs was performed using a piRNA microarray screen in PCa tissues and several piRNAs were identified as dysregulated. The two up-regulated piRNAs (piR-19004 and piR-2878) and one down-regulated piR-19166 have been validated in the tissues and cell lines of PCa using quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Further studies showed that piR-19166 is transfected into PCa cells to suppress its migration and metastasis. Mechanistically, cortactin (CTTN) 3' untranslated region (UTR) was complementary combined with piR-19166 by bioinformatic prediction and identified as a direct target of piR-19166 through dual-luciferase reporter assay. Over-expression and knockdown of CTTN could respectively rescue and simulate the effects induced by piR-19166. Finally, piR-19166 suppresses migration and metastasis by the CTTN/matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) pathway in PCa cells. Thus, these findings suggested that piR-19166 targets the CTTN of prostate cancer cells to inhibit migration and distant metastasis, and may represent a new marker of diagnosis and treatment for PCa patients in early stages.