The LIM protein Ajuba promotes a metastatic phenotype in colon cancer cells

RNA-seq of Colon cancer cell line Sw480 with Ajuba OE and KD.Colon cancer, along with its potential for recurrence and metastasis is a major health problem. Understanding the proteins and pathways that regulate cell growth and metastasis may provide new targets for patient care. Ajuba is a LIM domain protein often found overexpressed in cancers, however the exact function role of Ajuba in colon cancer is not known. Our data demonstrates that Ajuba is highly expressed in colon cancer cell lines and tumour tissue compared to adjacent non-tumour tissue. Using publicly available data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, we correlated poor colon cancer patient survival with high Ajuba expression. To investigate the function of Ajuba in colon cancer metastasis we transduced cells with lentiviral constructs to knock down and overexpress Ajuba protein and performed an RNA-seq transcriptomic analysis on each modified line. Analysing the pathways enriched in the differentially expressed genes, we found Ajuba to be involved in cell proliferation, migration and differentiation. We confirmed our findings in biological assays, cells depleted of Ajuba were less proliferative, more sensitive to irradiation, migrated less and were less efficient in colony formation. Our data indicates that increased Ajuba expression observed in colon cancer supports proliferation, epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition and metastasis. 6 different cell lines in triplicates with Parental, ShScrambled, shAjuba 1, shAjuba2, Control and AjubaOE