RBFOX1 overexpression in the human glioblastoma cell line A172

The goal of this study was to investigate the regulatory events underlying post-transcriptional changes in gene expression, and more specifically in mRNA stability, in cancer. We observed that the stability of RBFOX1 targets was decreased in glioblastoma and, given that RBFOX1 is known to stabilize its targets mRNAs, we hypothesized that RBFOX1 down-regulation is responsible at least in part for alterations in the glioblastoma transcriptome. We overexpressed RBFOX1 in the A172 human glioblastoma cell line and performed RNA-sequencing on extracted RNA. We computed differential gene expression in the cell line overexpressing RBFOX1, compared to the control samples. We confirmed that RBFOX1 overexpression leads to an upregulation of the RBFOX1 regulon, including the majority of RBFOX1 targets that are destabilized in tumors. The results suggest that RBFOX1 downregulation in glioblastoma leads to the destabilization of its targets, which can be partially rescused through overexpression of RBFOX1. Overall design: RNA-seq of A172 cell lines overexpressing RBFOX1 or GFP, performed using Illumina NovaSeq 6000