Transcriptome profiling in response to adiponectin in human cancer-derived cells

Abstract

The adipocyte-derived hormone adiponectin exerts protective actions in several disorders, including some cancers. However, while growing data suggest that adiponectin could be an effective anticancer agent, its mechanism of action in cancer cells is still poorly known. Here, using microarrays, we identified a set of 1,301 genes commonly modulated in three cancer-derived cell lines in response to short-term stimulation with full-length recombinant human adiponectin. Most of these genes are involved in translation regulation, immune or stress responses, and cell proliferation. Furthermore, among genes linked to disease that were retrieved by functional enrichment tests using text mining based on PubMed analysis, we found that 66% are involved in malignant neoplasms, further supporting the link between adiponectin and cancer mechanisms. Bioinformatic analysis demonstrated the diversity of signaling pathways and transcription factors potentially mediating adiponectin effects on gene expression, illustrating the complexity of adiponectin mechanisms of action in cancer cells.

Characterization of the transcriptome profiles related to globin gene switching during in vitro erythroid maturation

“…Our studies for profile-2 genes (Table 4) revealed the cell cycle control proteins, and Aryl hydrocarbon receptor, and ATM pathways with the highest number of gene hits. Of interest is the ATM pathway (Additional file 1: Figure S5D) which phosphorylates several proteins to activate the DNA damage checkpoint, leading to cell cycle arrest, apoptosis and cell differentiation [59]. This pathway also regulates DNAPK which has been associated with bone marrow failure [60].…”

Gene network analysis leads to functional validation of pathways linked to cancer cell growth and survival

“…The sets of genes expressed in human normal liver, HCC and HepG2 cells were obtained from previous published studies (Supporting information, Table S1). Intracellular pathways or transcription factors modulated by various stimuli, were identified and retrieved from previously published experiments performed on different human cancer cell lines, and HepG2 cells (Supporting information, Table S2 and [16]).…”

“…Table S4. Sets of human genes retrieved from published global gene analyses (According to the procedure previously described [16]).…”

“…This second approach thus took into account experimental data obtained mainly in cancer cell lines, including HepG2 cells, and have been previously published [16]. A set of 4736 genes (i.e.…”

“…Only binding sites with significant differences in representativity in either healthy liver and HCC are shown (p<0.05). (B) According to the procedure previously described [16], sets of human genes modulated by transcription factors were retrieved from published experiments (53 sets). For each transcription factor, frequency of genes (x-axis) modulated was calculated for either genome, liver and HCC gene sets.…”