MITF reprograms the extracellular matrix and focal adhesion in melanoma
- University of Iceland, Iceland
- University of Iowa, United States
- University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland
- Institut Curie, France
- Univ Rennes1, France
Abstract
The microphthalmia associated transcription factor (MITF) is a critical regulator of melanocyte development and differentiation. It also plays an important role in melanoma where it has been described as a molecular rheostat that, depending on activity levels, allows reversible switching between different cellular states. Here we show that MITF directly represses the expression of genes associated with the extracellular matrix (ECM) and focal adhesion pathways in human melanoma cells as well as of regulators of epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) such as CDH2, thus affecting cell morphology and cell-matrix interactions. Importantly, we show that these effects of MITF are reversible, as expected from the rheostat model. The number of focal adhesion points increased upon MITF knockdown, a feature observed in drug resistant melanomas. Cells lacking MITF are similar to the cells of minimal residual disease observed in both human and zebrafish melanomas. Our results suggest that MITF plays a critical role as a repressor of gene expression and is actively involved in shaping the microenvironment of melanoma cells in a cell-autonomous manner.
Data availability
MITF CUT&RUN sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession codes GSE153020 and the RNA-Seq data discussed in this publication are available under the accession number GSE163646.
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MITF ChIP-seq in primary melanocyte and melanoma as a function of oncogenic BRAFNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE50681.
Article and author information
Author details
Ossia Margarita Eichhoff
E Elizabeth Patton
Eirikur Steingrimsson
Funding
Icelandic Centre for Research (184861 and 767 207067)
- Eirikur Steingrimsson
National Institutes of Health (A2062457)
- Robert A Cornell
H2020 European Research Council (ZF-MEL-CHEMBIO-648489)
- E Elizabeth Patton
L'Oreal Melanoma Research Alliance (401181)
- E Elizabeth Patton
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- C Daniela Robles-Espinoza, International Laboratory for Human Genome Research, Mexico
Version history
- Received: September 14, 2020
- Accepted: January 11, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: January 13, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 3, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Dilshat et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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MITF reprograms the extracellular matrix and focal adhesion in melanoma
eLife 10:e63093.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63093
Further reading
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Cancer stem cells (CSCs) undergo epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) to drive metastatic dissemination in experimental cancer models. However, tumour cells undergoing EMT have not been observed disseminating into the tissue surrounding human tumour specimens, leaving the relevance to human cancer uncertain. We have previously identified both EpCAM and CD24 as CSC markers that, alongside the mesenchymal marker Vimentin, identify EMT CSCs in human oral cancer cell lines. This afforded the opportunity to investigate whether the combination of these three markers can identify disseminating EMT CSCs in actual human tumours. Examining disseminating tumour cells in over 12,000 imaging fields from 74 human oral tumours, we see a significant enrichment of EpCAM, CD24 and Vimentin co-stained cells disseminating beyond the tumour body in metastatic specimens. Through training an artificial neural network, these predict metastasis with high accuracy (cross-validated accuracy of 87-89%). In this study, we have observed single disseminating EMT CSCs in human oral cancer specimens, and these are highly predictive of metastatic disease.
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Esophageal cancer (EC) is a fatal digestive disease with a poor prognosis and frequent lymphatic metastases. Nevertheless, reliable biomarkers for EC diagnosis are currently unavailable. Accordingly, we have performed a comparative proteomics analysis on cancer and paracancer tissue-derived exosomes from eight pairs of EC patients using label-free quantification proteomics profiling and have analyzed the differentially expressed proteins through bioinformatics. Furthermore, nano-flow cytometry (NanoFCM) was used to validate the candidate proteins from plasma-derived exosomes in 122 EC patients. Of the 803 differentially expressed proteins discovered in cancer and paracancer tissue-derived exosomes, 686 were up-regulated and 117 were down-regulated. Intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (CD54) was identified as an up-regulated candidate for further investigation, and its high expression in cancer tissues of EC patients was validated using immunohistochemistry, real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR), and western blot analyses. In addition, plasma-derived exosome NanoFCM data from 122 EC patients concurred with our proteomic analysis. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis demonstrated that the AUC, sensitivity, and specificity values for CD54 were 0.702, 66.13%, and 71.31%, respectively, for EC diagnosis. Small interference (si)RNA was employed to silence the CD54 gene in EC cells. A series of assays, including cell counting kit-8, adhesion, wound healing, and Matrigel invasion, were performed to investigate EC viability, adhesive, migratory, and invasive abilities, respectively. The results showed that CD54 promoted EC proliferation, migration, and invasion. Collectively, tissue-derived exosomal proteomics strongly demonstrates that CD54 is a promising biomarker for EC diagnosis and a key molecule for EC development.
