Transcriptomic analysis of neuroblastoma cells in response to stable over-expression of FOXD3 antisense RNA 1 (FOXD3-AS1)

Neuroblastoma (NB), a malignant embryonic tumor arising from primitive neural crest cells, accounts for more than 7% of malignancies and around 15% of cancer-related mortality in childhood. Better elucidating the mechanisms of tumorigenesis and aggressiveness is important for improving the therapeutic efficiencies of NB. Through mining of publically available microarray datasets, we discovered a novel 963-bp lncRNA, named FOXD3 antisense RNA 1 (FOXD3-AS1), as an independent prognostic marker for favorable clinical outcome of NB patients. To investigate the mechanisms underlying the oncogenic functions of FOXD3-AS1, we employed the Illumina HiSeq PE125/PE150 as a discovery platform to analyze the transcriptome profiling changes of human BE(2)-C cells in response to stable over-expression of FOXD3-AS1. The results showed that stable over-expression of FOXD3-AS1 led to altered expression of 3191 human mRNAs, including 1542 up-regulated genes and 1650 down-regulated genes. Then we found the possible roles of these differentially regulated mRNAs in selected pathways including cell cycle/proliferation, apoptosis, and cytokine/chemokine responses by Bioinformatic analysis. Furthermore, we validated the RNA-seq results by real-time RT-PCR with high identity. Overall, our results provided fundamental information about the transcriptomic changes in response to FOXD3-AS1 over-expression in human NB cells, and these findings will help us understand the pathogenesis of NB. Total RNA of cells stably transfected with empty vector or FOXD3-AS1 was extracted using the TRIzol® reagent according to the manufacturer's instructions.RNA concentration was measured using a Qubit® RNA Assay Kit with a Qubit® 2.0 Fluorometer (Life Technologies, Inc.), and integrity was assessed using the RNA Nano 6000 Assay Kit with a Bioanalyzer 2100 system (Agilent Technologies, CA). Library preparation and transcriptome sequencing on an Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform were performed by Novogene Bioinformatics Technology Co., Ltd. (Beijing, China), and 100 bp paired-end reads were generated. HTSeq v0.6.0 was used to count the reads numbers mapped to each gene.