TTF-1-regulated miR-532-5p targets KRAS and MKL2 oncogenes and induces apoptosis in lung adenocarcinoma [rt-pcr]

Thyroid transcription factor-1 (TTF-1), also known as NKX2-1, plays a role as a lineage-survival oncogene in lung adenocarcinoma with double-edged sword characteristics. Although previous studies steadily accumulated evidence for roles of TTF-1 in the transcriptional regulation of protein-coding genes, very little is known about its regulatory relationship with miRNAs. In this study, we have identified miR-532-5p as a novel transcriptional target of TTF-1 by an integrative approach, which was designed to extract maximal information from expression profiles of both patient tumors in vivo and TTF-1-inducible cell lines in vitro. Consequently, we have found that miR-532-5p is directly regulated by TTF-1 through its binding to a genomic region 8 kb upstream of miR-532-5p, which appeared to impose transcriptional regulation independent of that of CLCN5, a protein-coding gene harboring miR-532-5p in its intron 3. Further, we have also identified KRAS and MKL2 as novel direct targets of miR-532-5p. Introduction of miR-532-5p mimics markedly induced apoptosis in KRAS-mutant as well as KRAS wildtype lung adenocarcinoma cell lines. Interestingly, miR-532-5p affected the MEK-ERK pathway signaling specifically in cell lines sensitive to siKRAS treatment, while the miR-532-5p-mediated effects were clearly phenocopied by repressing expression or inhibiting function of MKL2 regardless of KRAS mutation status. In summary, our findings demonstrate that miR-532-5p is as novel transcriptional target of TTF-1 and plays a tumor suppressive role by targeting KRAS and MKL2 in lung adenocarcinoma. Novel therapeutic strategies using miR-532-5p or an MKL2 inhibitor may prove effective against this hard-to-cure cancer irrespective of the dependence on KRAS-mediated signaling. TaqMan Low-Density Array (TLDA) using human miRNA A+B Cards Set v3.0 (Applied Biosystems) were applied to examine the global change of miRNA expression levels. miRNAs with Ct values higher than 32 were excluded from the analysis. Normalization was carried out with the expression level of RNU44. The data was presented as log2 of the relative quantity of each miRNA. BEAS-2B CTRL and TTF-1 cell lines were treated with 1 ug/ml Doxycycline for 48 h before RNA was harvested