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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 3|pp 3342—3352

The DNA methylation-regulated MCTP1 activates the drug-resistance of esophageal cancer cells

Lingsuo Kong1, Wan Yang1, Lanren Chen1, Liting Qian2
  • 1Department of Anesthesiology, West District of The First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230031, Anhui, P.R. China
  • 2Department of Radiotherapy, The First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 3230031, Anhui, P.R. China
Received: May 15, 2020Accepted: September 14, 2020Published: February 11, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104173

Copyright: © 2021 Kong 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

Accumulating studies have demonstrated that drug-resistance remains a great obstacle for the effective treatment of cancers. Esophageal cancer is still one of the most common cancers worldwide, which also suffers from the drug-resistance during clinical treatment. Here we performed drug-resistance profiling assays and identified several drug-resistant and drug-sensitive esophageal cancer cell lines. The following methylation sequencing showed that the MCTP1 gene is hypermethylated in the drug-resistant esophageal cancer cells. As a result, the expression of MCTP1 is down-regulated in the drug-resistant esophageal cancer cells. Down-regulation of MCTP1 also affects the migration and apoptosis of esophageal cancer cells, as revealed by the wound-healing and apoptosis assays. Further investigations proposed two signaling pathways that might involve in the MCTP1-mediated drug-resistance of esophageal cancer cells. All these results suggested that MCTP1 activates the drug-resistance of esophageal cancer cells, which has implications for further design of new biomarker of esophageal cancer treatment.