Metformin affects transcriptomic pathways involved in cell survival, metabolism and angiogenesis in ovarian cancer cells

The objectives of the present study are to determine the effect of metformin on sphere formation, extracellular matrix invasion, and transcriptome profile of ovarian cancer (COVCAR) cells isolated from ascites of chickens that naturally developed ovarian cancer. Our results suggest that metformin treatment significantly decreased sphere formation and invasiveness of COVCAR cells. Pairwise statistical analysis of transcriptomic data using Deseq2 software revealed 0, 4, 365 genes that were differentially expressed (DEGs) in cells treated with 0.5, 1, 2 mM metformin-treated cells compared to controls, respectively. COVCAR cells were subjected to metformin treatment at 0, 0.5, 1, 2-mM concentration. We performed RNAseq analysis using the Illumina® software platform on RNA samples extracted from metformin-treated COVCAR cells. Four replicates were sequenced for each condition. On average, 50 million 75 base pair single-end reads were sequenced for each replicate. Statistical analysis was performed for pairwise comparison between treatment and control group.