Human cancer cells are subjected to hypoxic conditions in many tumours. Hypoxia causes alterations in the glycolytic pathway activation through stabilization of hypoxia-inducible factor 1. Currently, two approaches are commonly used to model hypoxia: an alternative to generating low-oxygen conditions in an incubator, cells can be treated with CoCl 2. We performed RNA-seq experiments to study transcriptomes of human Caki-1 cells under real hypoxia and after CoCl 2 treatment. Despite causing transcriptional changes of a much higher order of magnitude for the genes in the hypoxia regulation pathway, CoCl 2 treatment fails to induce alterations in the glycolysis / gluconeogenesis pathway. Moreover, CoCl 2 caused aberrant activation of other oxidoreductases in glycine, serine and threonine metabolism pathways.
Keywords: CoCl2; Hypoxia; gene expression; metabolism pathways; renal cancer.