The Warburg effect describes an increase in aerobic glycolysis and enhanced lactate production in cancer cells. Lactate dehydrogenase A (LDH-A) regulates the last step of glycolysis that generates lactate and permits the regeneration of NAD ؉ . LDH-A gene expression is believed to be upregulated by both HIF and Myc in cancer cells to achieve increased lactate production. However, how oncogenic signals activate LDH-A to regulate cancer cell metabolism remains unclear. We found that the oncogenic receptor tyrosine kinase FGFR1 directly phosphorylates LDH-A. Phosphorylation at Y10 and Y83 enhances LDH-A activity by enhancing the formation of active, tetrameric LDH-A and the binding of LDH-A substrate NADH, respectively. Moreover, Y10 phosphorylation of LDH-A is common in diverse human cancer cells, which correlates with activation of multiple oncogenic tyrosine kinases. Interestingly, cancer cells with stable knockdown of endogenous LDH-A and rescue expression of a catalytic hypomorph LDH-A mutant, Y10F, demonstrate increased respiration through mitochondrial complex I to sustain glycolysis by providing NAD ؉ . However, such a compensatory increase in mitochondrial respiration in Y10F cells is insufficient to fully sustain glycolysis. Y10 rescue cells show decreased cell proliferation and ATP levels under hypoxia and reduced tumor growth in xenograft nude mice.
Our findings suggest that tyrosine phosphorylation enhances LDH-A enzyme activity to promote the Warburg effect and tumor growth by regulating the NADH/NAD؉ redox homeostasis, representing an acute molecular mechanism underlying the enhanced lactate production in cancer cells.Cancer cells take up more glucose than normal tissue and favor aerobic glycolysis, generating lactate through a NADHdependent enzyme, lactate dehydrogenase A (LDH-A), which catalyzes the conversion of pyruvate to lactate during glycolysis. This is the last step of glycolysis that permits the regeneration of NAD ϩ , which is needed as an electron acceptor to maintain cytosolic glucose catabolism (2). Therefore, most tumor cells are reliant on lactate production for their survival.LDH-A gene expression is believed to be upregulated by both HIF and Myc in cancer cells to achieve increased lactate production (1,7,16,(25)(26)(27). In addition, expression of LDH-A was previously implicated to be involved in tumor initiation and growth. Targeting LDH-A by short hairpin RNA (shRNA) in several tumor cell lines is sufficient to stimulate oxidative phosphorylation in these cells, which is accompanied by an increase in the rate of oxygen consumption and a decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential (5). This provides evidence of the direct link between glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation that involves LDH-A. Moreover, RNA interference (RNAi)-mediated reduction of LDH-A expression compromises the ability of tumor cells to proliferate under hypoxia and induce tumorigenesis (5). Recently, it was reported that targeting LDH-A by a small-molecule inhibitor, FX11, induced significant oxidative stre...