Aberrant Expressional Profiling of Small RNA by Cold Atmospheric Plasma Treatment in Human Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Cells.

Bo Guo,Dehui Xu,Zhijie Liu,Yijie Liu,Chen Huang,Wen Li

doi:10.3389/fgene.2021.809658

Abstract

Small RNAs (sRNAs), particularly microRNAs (miRNAs), are functional molecules that modulate mRNA transcripts and have been implicated in the etiology of various types of cancer. Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) is a physical technology widely used in the field of cancer treatment after exhibiting extensive lethality on cancer cells. However, few studies have reported the exact role of miRNAs in CAP-induced anti-cancer effects. The aim of the present study was to determine whether miRNAs are involved in CAP-induced cytotoxicity by using high-throughput sequencing. Our research demonstrated that 28 miRNAs were significantly changed (17 upregulated and 11downregulated) following 24 h of treatment with a room-temperature argon plasma jet for 90 s compared with that of the untreated group in human chronic myeloid leukemia K562 cells. GO enrichment analysis revealed that these target genes were related to cell organelles, protein binding, and single-organism processes. Furthermore, KEGG pathway analysis demonstrated that the target genes of differentially expressed miRNAs were primarily involved in the cAMP signaling pathway, AMPK signaling pathway, and phosphatidylinositol signaling system. Taken together, our study demonstrated that CAP treatment could significantly alter the small RNA expression profile of chronic myeloid leukemia cells and provide a novel theoretical insight for elucidating the molecular mechanisms in CAP biomedicine application.

Highlights

Noncoding RNA molecules have been extensively explored in the past decades, expanding our understanding of functional elements in the genome (Parts et al, 2012)
Human chronic myeloid leukemia K562 cells were seeded into 12-well plates, and treated with Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) for 60, 90, and 120 s
To prepare enough RNA for small RNA library construction and sequencing, cells treated with CAP for 90 s at 24 h were collected

Summary

Introduction

Noncoding RNA (ncRNA) molecules have been extensively explored in the past decades, expanding our understanding of functional elements in the genome (Parts et al, 2012) These noncoding RNAs are subjected to several different types of small RNAs (sRNAs), a class of 21–24 nucleotides (nt) RNA that play important regulatory roles in the majority of eukaryotes (Lu et al, 2005). MiRNAs conventionally silence genes by targeting mRNA transcripts via base pair complementarity in the 3′ untranslated region (3′-UTR) (Fang and Rajewsky, 2011). This targeting can induce transcript cleavage, degradation, destabilization, or repression of translation, modulating protein levels. It is especially interesting to analyze small RNA transcript levels as intermediate traits potentially causative of downstream effects, as miRNAs have already been implicated in a wide range of human physiological and pathological processes (Lee et al, 2011; Bhattacharya et al, 2018)

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