Effect of Regnase-2/MCPIP2/ZC3H12B overexpression in human glioblastoma U-251 MG cell line.

Regnase-2/MCPIP2/ZC3H12B is a protein belonging to the ZC3H12 protein family. There are three other proteins of this family present in humans of which Regnase-1/MCPIP1/ZC3H12A is the founder member as well as the best-described protein. All proteins of this family contain a NYN domain with endoribonuclease activity and a CCCH-type zinc finger responsible for interaction with substrate RNA. Although the NYN domain has a high degree of similarity across all four members the in vitro RNase activity was shown only for two of them, namely Regnase-1 and Regnase-3. Interestingly the ZC3H12 family proteins have unique expression patterns with Regnase-2 being expressed almost solely in the central nervous system. What is more, Regnase-2 is downregulated in human glioblastoma, and its expression is inversely correlated with tumor grade. To decipher the role of Regnase-2 in human glioblastoma we performed RNA sequencing of U-251 MG cells overexpressing Regnase-2 and control, mock-transfected cells. To investigate the role of Regnase-2 in U-251 MG cells we established two U-251 MG cell lines with doxycycline-inducible overexpression of Regnase-2 or luciferase (control/mock) and we induced the expression of transgenes for 24 hours. Differential expression profiling was performed using data obtained from RNA-seq of the two cell lines (outsourced to QIAGEN Genomic Services, Germany).