Co-expression network analysis for the identification of potential prostate cancer genes and in vitro confirmation of their expression in cell model in the presence of Staphylococcal tsst-1 gene

Abstract

Prostate cancer has arisen as an important life-threatening malignancy in males worldwide. Therefore, it is important to study underlying molecular pathways to be able to proposed appropriate a novel pathway of apoptosis in prostate cancer. This study aimed to explore the molecular effects of Staphylococcal tsst-1 gene on PC3 cell line apoptosis by in silico and in vitro studies. In this work, the differential expression of genes in prostate cancer was predicted by analyzing the public dataset GSE132063. Then, the pcDNA3.1 (+) vector was used to transfer tsst-1 gene to the PC3 cells and its effects was investigated using flow cytometry and qPCR. Co-expression network analysis indicated that lncRNAs had strong relationship with apoptosis genes in prostate cancer. Results of protein-protein docking indicated that BCL2L11, GRAMD3 and EGR1 interacted with tsst-1. Finally, the flow cytometry results showed that transfection by pcDNA3.1 (+)- tsst-1 could increase cellular death rates (48.15%) compared with the pcDNA3.1 (+) groups (6.35%); and the expression levels of GRAMD3, EGR1, BCL2L11 and PLAC4 were dysregulated in tsst-1 -transfected PC3 compared with empty-transfected PC3 (p < .05). In conclusion, our data will provide a novel landscape to understanding the mechanism of Staphylococcal tsst-1 gene on the PC3 cells apoptosis pathways.

Keywords:

• bioinformatics
• integrated analysis
• tsst-1 Toxin
• prostate cancer
• apoptosis

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the staff of Shahrekord Branch, Islamic Azad University (Shahrekord, Iran) for their helps. There is no financial support and conflict of interest in this study.

Author contributions

Maryam Safarpour-Dehkordi; Contributed to conception, design and all experimental work and had full access to all the data in the study. Nooshin Samimi-Dehkordi; Contributed to all experimental work, data and statistical analysis, and interpretation of data. Reihaneh Khademi and Maryam Kabirian-Dehkordi; were responsible for overall supervision. Maryam Amiri and Faranak Aali Drafted of the manuscript and Mohsen Asgari conducted the statistical analysis. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.