| dc.description.abstract | We have hypothesized that dietary modulation of intestinal miRNA expression may contribute to the chemoprotective effects of nutritional bioactives (fish oil and pectin). Using a rat colon carcinogen model, we determined miRNAs-let-7d, miR-15b, miR-107, miR-191 and miR-324-5p were modulated by fish oil + pectin. We also demonstrated that BACE1 and PTEN are targets of miR-107 and miR-21, respectively.
To further elucidate the biological effects of diet and carcinogen on miRNAs, we integrated global miRNAs, total and polysomal gene expression datasets obtained from the above mentioned study and used four computational approaches. We demonstrated that polysomal profiling is tightly related to microRNA changes when compared with total mRNA profiling. In addition, diet and carcinogen exposure modulated a number of microRNAs and complementary gene expression analyses showed that oncogenic PTK2B, PDE4B, and TCF4 were suppressed by the chemoprotective diet at both the mRNA and protein levels.
To determine the function of select diet and colon carcinogen modulated miRNAs and to validate their targets, we carried out a series of loss and gain of function experiments along with luciferase reporter assays. We verified that PDE4B and TCF4 are direct targets of miR-26b and miR-203, respectively. PTK2B was determined to be an indirect target of miR-19b. In addition, microRNA physiological function was assessed by examining effects on apoptosis and cell proliferation.
To better understand how the colonic stem cell population responds to environmental factors such as diet and carcinogen, we investigated the chemoprotective effects of dietary agents on miRNAs in colonic stem cells obtained from Lgr5-EGFP-IRES-creERT2 knock in mice injected with AOM. We demonstrated that based on relative expression of miR-125a-5p, miR-190b and miR-191 in stem cells vs. daughter cells and differentiated cells, these miRNAs may be stem cell specific miRNAs. We also identified miR-21 to be significantly reduced in stem cells compared to differentiated cells and selectively modulated by these dietary agents in stem cells.
In summary, our results indicate for the first time that fish oil plus pectin protect against colon tumorigenesis in part by modulating a subset of miRNAs and their target genes (mRNAs) implicated in the regulation of the colon stem cell niche and tumor development. | en |
