Expression of genes related to H. pylori infection and its virulence factor CagA, in AGS cells

Helicobacter pylori infection promotes chronic inflammation and plethora of DNA damages including strand breaks, base alterations, point mutations, microsatellite instability and epigenetic alterations. The gastric epitheliaI cells, in order to prevent genomic instability, require an integrous DNA damage repair (DDR) machinery which, however, has been reported to be modulated by the infection. CagA is a major Hp virulence factor that deregulates host cell functions such as proliferation, apoptosis and chromosomal integrity. Its pathogenic activity is partly regulated by tyrosine phosphorylation on repeated EPIYA-motifs. Our aim was to identify putative effects of H. pylori infection and CagA protein on DDR machinery, investigating the transcriptome of AGS cells, infected with P12 H. pylori wild-type strain, as well as, its corresponding CagA knock-out and the CagA phosphorylation-defective mutant following tyrosine (EPIYA) substitution by phenylalanine (EPIFA) in the EPIYA-C motifs. Upon RNA-Sequencing on polyA-selected transcripts we performed Differential Expression Analysis, Pathway Enrichment Analysis and visualization on KEGG Pathway Maps per DDR mechanism. Key DDR components that were observed to be downregulated in a CagA-related manner were validated via Western Blot utilizing AGS and the non-cancerous GES1 cell lines. Transcriptome analysis revealed that a notable number of DDR genes were downregulated during H. pylori infection resulting to potential modulation of Base Excision Repair, Mismatch Repair and a more intricate deregulation of Nucleotide Excision Repair, Homologous Recombination and Non-Homologous End-Joining. CagA contributes to MUTYH, FEN1, APE1, POLD1 and LIG1 downregulation and those observations were verified on the protein expression level, with the exception of APE1 that was on contrary observed to be upregulated. Our study accentuates the role of CagA, as a significant contributor of the H. pylori infection-mediated DDR modulation, disrupting the balance between DNA damage introduction and repair thus favoring genomic instability and potentially contributing to gastric carcinogenesis. Overall design: For the 4 different conditions (uninfected AGS cells, AGS cells infected with wild-type H. pylori strain, AGS cells infected with CagA-phosphorylation-defective H. pylori strain, AGS cells infected with CagA-knock-out H. pylori strain), 8 samples were analyzed. Experiments conducted in biological duplicate.