Transcriptome profiling of human urothelial carcinoma cell lines RT-112, VM-Cub-1, SW1710, UMUC3 and a benign urothelial control HBLAK engineered to stably express HDAC5 against their vector control

Aberrant expression of histone deacetylases (HDACs) and their activity are associated with a broad range of tumor development. However, based on cell or tissue types, class IIA HDACs such as HDAC4 and HDAC5 may facilitate or inhibit cancer progression. The goal of this project is to examine the gene expression changes caused by HDAC5 expression. Here, we studied the effects of stable expression of HDAC5 (that is normally downregulated or have a weak basal expression) in four urothelial carcinoma (UC) cell lines (RT112, VM-Cub-1, SW1710, and UM-UC-3) by rRNA-depleted RNA-sequencing in comparison to their vector controls. We observed that HDAC5 expression in VM-Cub-1 triggered a drastic phenotype change from an epitheloid to a mesenchymal (i.e., epithelial-mesenchymal transition, EMT) and altogether diminished cell proliferation of the other three cell lines. Our RNA-seq data are in line with the phenotypic transformation of VM-Cub-1. In addition, we also performed a gene expression profiling of HBLAK, a spontaneously immortalized from primary human bladder epithelial cells that can be directly compared with the four UC vector cells. HBLAK vector cells only were included for RNA-seq as the cells failed to express HDAC5 after lentiviral transduction and selection.