Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 12 pp 16500—16512

Circular RNA circKIF4A facilitates the malignant progression and suppresses ferroptosis by sponging miR-1231 and upregulating GPX4 in papillary thyroid cancer

Wenkuan Chen1, *, , Jianchang Fu2, *, , Yingle Chen1, , Yudong Li1, , Li Ning1, , Dou Huang1, , Shumei Yan2, , Quan Zhang1, ,

  • 1 Department of Head and Neck, Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center, State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Collaborative Innovation Center of Cancer Medicine, Guangzhou, China
  • 2 Department of Pathology, Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center, State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Collaborative Innovation Center of Cancer Medicine, Guangzhou, China
* Equal contribution

Received: September 21, 2020       Accepted: February 25, 2021       Published: June 21, 2021      

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203172
How to Cite

Copyright: © 2021 Chen 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

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are one type of non-coding RNA. They act as important role in regulating various biological processes in the malignant progression. But we don’t clearly know the specific mechanism of the majority circRNAs in papillary thyroid tumor progression. In the current study, we explored circKIF4A and the result showed that it had high expression in papillary thyroid cancer. The functions of circKIF4A were explored by CCK-8, transwell, and mouse xenograft experiments. Knockdown of circKIF4A could suppress papillary thyroid cell growth and migration. In addition, RIP assays and dual luciferase vector reporter assays were further conducted. Our consequence showed circKIF4A facilitated the malignant progress of papillary thyroid tumor by sponging miR-1231 and upregulating GPX4 expression. In conclusion, our study proved that circKIF4A-miR-1231-GPX4 axis played a vital role in cancer proliferation and ferroptosis by competing endogenous RNAs. Therefore, targeting circKIF4A is very likely to be a potential method for treatment of papillary thyroid cancer in the future.

Abbreviations

3’-UTR: 3’-untranslated regions; circRNA: circular RNA; GPX4: glutathione peroxidase 4; miRNAs: microRNAs; SD: standard deviation; RIP: RNA immunoprecipitation.