1,8-dihydroxy-3-acetyl-6-methyl-9,10 anthraquinone exhibits a potent radiosensitizing effect with induced oncosis in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells

A Continuous Add-On Probe Reveals the Nonlinear Enlargement of Mitochondria in Light-Activated Oncosis

Oncosis, depending on DNA damage and mitochondrial swelling, is an important approach for treating cancer and other diseases. However, little is known about the behavior of mitochondria during oncosis, due to the lack of probes for in situ visual illumination of the mitochondrial membrane and mtDNA. Herein, a mitochondrial lipid and mtDNA dual-labeled probe, MitoMN, and a continuous add-on assay, are designed to image the dynamic process of mitochondria in conditions that are unobservable with current mitochondrial probes. Meanwhile, the MitoMN can induce oncosis in a light-activated manner, which results in the enlargement of mitochondria and the death of cancer cells. Using structured illumination microscopy (SIM), MitoMN-stained mitochondria with a dual-color response reveals, for the first time, how swelled mitochondria interacts and fuses with each other for a nonlinear enlargement to accelerate oncosis into an irreversible stage. With this sign of irreversible oncosis revealed by MitoMN, oncosis can be segregated into three stages, including before oncosis, initial oncosis, and accelerated oncosis.

Angiogenesis and evading immune destruction are the main related transcriptomic characteristics to the invasive process of oral tongue cancer

Metastasis of head and neck tumors is responsible for a high mortality rate. Understanding its biochemistry may allow insights into tumorigenesis. To that end we carried out RNA-Seq analyses of 5 SCC9 derived oral cancer cell lines displaying increased invasive potential. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were annotated based on p-values and false discovery rate (q-values). All 292 KEGG pathways related to the human genome were compared in order to pinpoint the absolute and relative contributions to the invasive process considering the 8 hallmarks of cancer plus 2 new defined categories, as well as we made with our transcriptomic data. In terms of absolute contribution, the highest correlations were associated to the categories of evading immune destruction and energy metabolism and for relative contributions, angiogenesis and evading immune destruction. DEGs were distributed into each one of all possible modes of regulation, regarding up, down and continuum expression, along the 3 stages of metastatic progression. For p-values twenty-six genes were consistently present along the tumoral progression and 4 for q-values. Among the DEGs, we found 2 novel potentially informative metastatic markers: PIGG and SLC8B1. Furthermore, interactome analysis showed that MYH14, ANGPTL4, PPARD and ENPP1 are amenable to pharmacological interventions.