Neuronal-like differentiation of A549 cells in response to PRMT1 knockdown

Formerly we found that cancer-promoting factors, such as some typical epigenetic modification factors, are neural specific or enriched in embryonic neural cells, and play a key role in conferring the property of nerual stemness to cancer cells or in maintaining neural stemness in neural stem/progenitor cells. Our recent study demonstrated that PRMT1, a protein arginine methyltransferase, serves also to maintain neural stemness in either neural stem/progenitor cells or cancer cells. We used microarray to analyze global gene expression change in A549 cells after PRMT1 knockdown. PRMT1 function was inhibited in A549 cells via shRNA knockdown. Cells showed significant morphological change after 8 days of PRMT1 knockdown compared with control cells that was infected with lentivirus carrying empty vector. Control and knockdown cells were then collected and subjected to microassay analysis. Two samples, one was control A549 cells and the other was the cells with PRMT1 knockdown, were used for microarray assay.