Folic Acid Inhibited Vasculogenic Mimicry in Esophageal Cancer Cell Line Eca-109, the One Target Was EphA2

Abstract

The degree of vasculogenic mimicry(VM) is correlated with the prognosis of esophageal cancer, and folic acid supplementation could decrease esophagus cancer deaths among populations. This study aimed to explore the effect of folic acid on VM formation of esophageal cancer cell, and the target. Human esophageal squamous cancer cell lines(Eca-109) were cultured with different concentrations of folic acid (0,1,10,100,200,400, 600,800 μg/ml). A cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8) assay was used to measure the cell proliferation. Then, the amount of VM under the effect of different concentrations of folic acid was observed. Target genes were screened out from several possible targets genes including MMP2, MMP9, EphA2, VE-cad or Ln-5γ2 by employing reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction(RT-qPCR). Finally, western blot analysis was used to verify the target proteins. In conclusion, this study found that folic acid inhibited the formation of VM in Eca-109 cells, and the one target protein was EphA2.

Acknowledgments

We thank all the participants, researchers and collaborators for their contribution. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81673147). The funding unit had no role in the whole study including study design, data collection, experiments, analysis of results and composition of the manuscript.

Availability of Data and Materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the present study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Author Contributions

Yuling Xu designed the study, performed the research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper. Da Pan contributed to the writing and revisions, Lingmeng Fu, Jie Wei, and Hui Xia contributed to Experimental methods and data collection. Shaokang Wang is the corresponding author, contributing to supervision, design, paper revision and funding support, GuiJu Sun contributed to conceptualization.

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The present study was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81673147).