Regulators of Human Androgen Biosynthesis

Androgens are essential for sexual development and reproduction. However, androgen regulation in health and disease is poorly understood. Previously, we showed that human adrenocortical H295R cells grown under starvation conditions acquire a hyperandrogenic steroid profile with changes in steroid metabolizing enzymes HSD3B2 and CYP17A1 essential for androgen production. Furthermore, we have shown that metformin inhibits androgen production of steroidogenic H295R cells and inhibits complex I activity of the respriatory chain. Therefore, to search for underlying mechanisms regulting androgen production and to understand the basic biology of androgens, we have characterized the gene expression profile of H295R cells grown under normal growth conditions, serum starvation (hyperandrogenic) growth conditions as well as after metformin treatment (hypoandrogenic). In this dataset, we first characterized the gene expression profile of H295R cells cultured under nromal growth vs serum-starved (hypernadrogenic) growth conditions. Expression profiling of starved H295R cells revealed alterations in genes involved in steroid and energy metabolism and signal transduction. We discovered two new gene networks around RARB and ANGPTL1, and show how they regulate androgen biosynthesis (Udhane SS et al.,2015). In a second part, we compared the gene expression profile of H295R cells grown under serum starvation (hyperandrogenic) conditions to metformin treated (hypoandrogenic) cells in search for the underlying androgen regulating network. (Udhane et al., manuscript in preparation). Total RNA was isolated and purified with an RNeasy Micro kit (Qiagen GmbH, Hilden, Germany) from cultured H295R cells under normal growth, serum starvation and metformin treated condition. Microarray experiments were carried out from three independent experiments with GeneChip Human Gene 1.0 ST arrays (Affymetrix Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA) at the Genomic Technologies Facility (GTF) of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.