Expression data from GNMT knockout mice in Hepatocytes and OKER cell lines

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the first cause of death in cirrhotic patients. Liver cirrhosis at a high risk of HCC has abnormal S-Adenosylmethionine (SAMe) levels. Catabolism of SAMe is mainly mediated by Glycine N-methyltransferase (GNMT), Lack in GNMT expression leads to epigenetic regulation of critical carcinogenesis pathways and mounting evidence assigns an essential role of GNMT in HCC. Methods: Here we have studied the role of LKB1-AMPK and RAS in the proliferation and transformation of GNMT-deficient HCC. Results. GNMT-deficient HCC was characterized by LKB1-AMPK misconnection, leading to resistance of apoptosis response mediated by a positive regulation of cAMP-PKA-CaMKKβ cascade. Additionally, Ras-mediated hyperactivation of LKB1 contributes to the proliferation of GNMT-deficient HCC in an ERK/p90RSK-dependent manner. The observed LKB1-induced Ras activation, was due to the regulation of RASGRP3 expression. Notably, the human HCC tumors with poorer prognosis showed the lowest levels of GNMT, p-AMPKα(Thr172) and the highest activation of Ras/LKB1/RASGRP3 axis. The present data suggest a correlation between LKB1 and RAS activity in a context of HCC with low GNMT expression, indicating that activation of the RAS/LKB1/RASGRP3 cascade might possess an important prognostic role in human liver cancer. Furthermore, these findings open the possibility to design new therapeutic strategies for the treatment of liver cancer. HCC induced wild-type or Gnmt knockout mice at 3 weeks old were used for RNA extraction and hybridization on Illumina microarrays. The study comprises three groups of samples: OKER cell line(n=3), GNMT-KO mouse hepatocytes (n=3) ,GNMT-WT mouse hepatocytes(n=3)