Mohammad Reza Asgharzadeh
1,2,3, Mohammad M. Pourseif
1, Jaleh Barar
1,4 
, Morteza Eskandani
1, Mojtaba Jafari Niya
2,3, Mohammad Reza Mashayekhi
5, Yadollah Omidi
1,4* 1 Research Center for Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology, Biomedicine Institute, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
2 Department of Biology, Fars Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran
3 Department of Biology, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran
4 Department of Pharmaceutics, Faculty of Pharmacy, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
5 Department of Genetics, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran
Abstract
Introduction: Testis-specific gene antigen 10 (TSGA10) is a less-known gene, which is involved in the vague biological paths of different cancers. Here, we investigated the TSGA10 expression using different concentrations of glucose under hypoxia and also its interaction with the hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1).
Methods: The breast cancer MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cells were cultured with different concentrations of glucose (5.5, 11.0 and 25.0 mM) under normoxia/hypoxia for 24, 48, and 72 hours and examined for the HIF-1α expression and cell migration by Western blotting and scratch assays. The qPCR was employed to analyze the expression of TSGA10. Three-dimensional (3D) structure and the energy minimization of the interacting domain of TSGA10 were performed by MODELLER v9.17 and Swiss-PDB viewer v4.1.0/UCSF Chimera v1.11. The UCSF Chimera v1.13.1 and Hex 6.0 were used for the molecular docking simulation. The Cytoscape v3.7.1 and STRING v11.0 were used for protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis. The HIF-1a related hypoxia pathways were obtained from BioModels database and reconstructed in CellDesigner v4.4.2.
Results: The increased expression of TSGA10 was found to be significantly associated with the reduced metastasis in the MDA-MB-231 cells, while an inverse relationship was seen between the TSGA10 mRNA level and cellular migration but not in the MCF-7 cells. The C-terminal domain of TSGA10 interacted with HIF-1α with high affinity, resulting in PPI network with 10 key nodes (HIF-1α, VEGFA, HSP90AA1, AKT1, ARNT, TP53, TSGA10, VHL, JUN, and EGFR).
Conclusions: Collectively, TSGA10 functional expression alters under the hyper-/hypo-glycemia and hypoxia, which indicates its importance as a candidate bio-target for the cancer therapy.