Monitoring and Regulating Intracellular GPX4 mRNA Using Gold Nanoflare Probes and Enhancing Erastin-Induced Ferroptosis

Xiaoyan Liu; Qiangqiang Yang; Yanan Sui; Qiaoli Yue; Shuqing Yan; Chuan Li; Min Hong

doi:10.3390/bios12121178

Monitoring and Regulating Intracellular GPX4 mRNA Using Gold Nanoflare Probes and Enhancing Erastin-Induced Ferroptosis

Biosensors (Basel). 2022 Dec 17;12(12):1178. doi: 10.3390/bios12121178.

Authors

Xiaoyan Liu¹, Qiangqiang Yang¹, Yanan Sui¹, Qiaoli Yue¹, Shuqing Yan¹, Chuan Li¹, Min Hong^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Liaocheng University, Liaocheng 252059, China.
² Shandong Harway Pharma Co., Ltd., Dongying 257000, China.

Abstract

Glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPX4) plays an important effect on ferroptosis. Down-regulating the expression of GPX4 mRNA can decrease the content of GPX4. In this work, a gold nanoflare (AuNF) probe loaded with anti-sense sequences targeting for GPX4 mRNA was designed to monitor and down-regulate intracellular GPX4 mRNA using fluorescence imaging in situ and using anti-sense technology. The results revealed that there was a marked difference for the expression of GPX4 mRNA in different cell lines, and the survival rate of cancer cells was not significantly effected when the relative mRNA and protein expression levels of GPX4 was down-regulated by AuNF probes. However, when co-treated with AuNF probes, the low expression of GPX4 strengthened erastin-induced ferroptosis, and this synergy showed a better effect on inhibiting the proliferation of cancer cells.

Keywords: AuNF probe; GPX4 mRNA; ferroptosis.

MeSH terms

Cell Line
Ferroptosis* / genetics
Glutathione Peroxidase / genetics
Glutathione Peroxidase / metabolism
Glutathione Peroxidase / pharmacology
Piperazines / pharmacology

Substances

Glutathione Peroxidase
erastin
Piperazines

Grants and funding

The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (Grant No. ZR2015BM024), The Ministry of Education industry-school cooperative education project (Grant No. 220605042200513), the Tai-Shan Scholar Research Fund of Shandong Province, and Research Foundation of Liaocheng University (Grant No. 318012026).