Glial tumors are a heterogeneous group of tumor categories which include various molecular signatures that form distinct types of tumors. Recent evidence confirmed that long noncoding RNAs (LncRNAs) are modulating tumorigenesis for various cancer types. Therefore, exploring the role of LncRNAs in glioma can facilitate our understanding of its’ development. Maternally expressed gene 3 (MEG3) is an imprinted gene located at the chromosome 14q and expressed in various tissue types. MEG3 has a tumor suppressor role in normal tissues and its loss of function has been associated with various cancer types including bladder, breast, bone marrow, cervix, colon, liver lung and meninges.(Zhou et al. 2012) Loss of MEG3 activity in these different cancer types is attributed to aberrant DNA methylation.(Gao et al. 2017; Zhang et al. 2017a)
The level of MEG3 expression in glial cells has been investigated in different studies with patient derived tissues and various cell lines. Studies including glioma tumors and controls reported that MEG3 expression level was decreased in glioma tissues compared to the non-cancerous glial cells of the patients.(Qin et al. 2017; Zhang and Guo 2019; Gong and Huang 2017) In vitro studies including the U251, U87 an A172 cell lines have also reported that MEG3 gene expression was relatively down regulated in these cell lines compared to the control cells.(Wang et al. 2012; Li et al. 2016) Furthermore, Tong et al. showed that MEG3 suppressed the proliferation, migration and invasion of glioma cells(Gong and Huang 2017) whereas, Gong et al. reported that MEG3 suppressed glioma cell proliferation and induced cell cycle progression, overexpression of MEG3 which weakened the Wnt/β catenin pathway.(Gong and Huang 2017) Considering the results of these previous studies, we conducted a comparative analysis of MEG3 activity in glioma and non-cancerous HUVEC cells by suppressing and overexpressing this gene. Interestingly, we found out that the suppression of MEG3 limited the proliferation of U87 cells while it promoted it this process in the HUVEC cells. As for the overexpression of MEG3, it promoted cell proliferation in both U87 and HUVEC cells. Consistent with cell proliferation, cell migration was also suppressed when MEG3 was downregulated in U87 and HUVEC cells and it did not significantly change when MEG3 was overexpressed in both cell types. Although experiments were repeated at least 3 times the results were completely inconsistent with previously reported data on MEG3. Therefore, we suspected the U87 cells that we were experimenting on and decided to conduct the same experiments on patient derived glioma cells. Primary glioma cells were obtained from oligodendroglioma (PD-OG) and glioblastoma patients’ (PD-GBM) cells. Upon the suppression of the MEG3 gene, PD-OG cells showed reduced cell proliferation and cell migration similar to the U87-MG cells, whereas the PD-GBM cells demonstrated increased cell proliferation and migration. In other words, the PD-OG results did not fit the previously acquired data on MEG3 activity but the PD-GBM results were consistent with them. Therefore, we proposed that MEG3 activity is dependent on the context of the cell and the cell type the gene is found in. This hypothesis was also partially formed considering the epigenetic differences between cells which have previously been drawn attention to by several studies. (Li et al. 2016; Modali et al. 2015; Iyer et al. 2017)
Based on our hypothesis that cells can be affected in different ways by MEG3 activity, we evaluated how MEG3 gene expression impacts drug sensitivity in glioma cells. Ma et al, previously showed that the overexpression of MEG3 enhanced the chemo sensitivity of U87 cells to cisplatin whereas the suppression of MEG3 increased the cells’ resistance(Ma et al. 2017) to the same drug. Here, we wanted to evaluate the effects of two different drugs with different mechanisms of action on glioma cells. 5-Fluorouracil (5FU) and navitoclax were chosen for increasing the range of drugs available for glioma treatment, since none of these drugs are currently used for this purpose. However, there are many experimental studies indicating their partial efficacy in suppressing tumor growth and cell proliferation.(Menei et al. 2005; Takahashi et al. 2014; Karpel-Massler et al. 2017; Levesley et al. 2013) Suppression of MEG3 in glial and HUVEC cells that have been treated with 5FU, caused cell proliferation in these cells to become inhibited. Whereas, the MEG3 downregulated cells that have been treated with navitoclax showed no significant change in their proliferation. In patient derived oligodendroglioma cells 5FU significantly decreased cell viability when MEG3 was suppressed. However, navitoclax did not induce any change in cell viability when MEG3 was suppressed. Neither 5FU nor navitoclax was found to be effective in reducing the cell viability of MEG3 suppressed and overexpressed patient derived glioblastoma cells. The suppression of MEG3 enhanced the sensitivity of oligodendroglioma cells to the 5FU drug. A previous study by Li L. et al, reported that the overexpression of MEG3 promoted chemo sensitivity to oxalipilatin.(Li et al. 2017) This result was consistent with the activity of cispilatin demonstrated in a study done by Ma et al. (Ma et al. 2017) Our results are opposing with the conclusions made by these studies in that higher levels of chemo sensitivity were achieved when MEG3 was suppressed rather than overexpressed. However, this may be due to the abundant expression of MEG3 in the cells we worked on and tested for chemo sensitivity. Therefore, we can once again propose that the activity of MEG3 is specific to the cell type and the cellular context which together dictate chemo sensitivity.
MEG3 activity differences between different cell lines pushed us to pose this question: Are there any significant differences between patient, disease and tumor associated characteristics of various glioma types? It has been reported that MEG3 gene expression levels were lower in glioma samples compared to normal and para-carcinogenic samples taken from patients. High grade (Grade III-IV) glioma tumors showed decreased expression of MEG3 compared to low grade glioma (Grade I-II) tumors.(Li et al. 2016; Zhang and Guo 2019; Gong and Huang 2017) There is a significant correlation between MEG3 expression and overall survival.(Gong and Huang 2017) Furthermore, studies have shown that lower levels of MEG3 expression is associated with higher WHO grade, older age at the time of diagnosis, low Karnofsky performance score (KPS), the presence of the wild-type isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH), tumor recurrence, and poor overall survival.(Momtazmanesh and Rezaei 2021) Although there is a significant reverse correlation between tumor malignancy and MEG3 expression in previous reports, we found that MEG3 activity differs between different cell lines and is mostly correlated with the IDH1 mutation status. IDH1 mutant tumors showed significant overexpression of MEG3. The maximum MEG3 expression was observed in Grade III tumors indicating the contribution of IDH1 mutations since IDH1 mutant gliomas are the most frequently observed amongst all the grades of glioma tumors.(Avsar et al. 2020)
Finally, MEG3 suppression was found to induce apoptotic cell death. Previous studies showed that MEG3 overexpression would induce apoptosis in lung carcinoma and glioma cells.(Zhao et al. 2018; Wang et al. 2012) Contrary to these findings, our experiments revealed that the induction of apoptosis was observed when MEG3 was suppressed. Other studies showed that when MEG3 was overexpressed in U251 and U87 MG cells the frequency of apoptotic cells was at somewhere between 12–15%. This meant that only a minor group of cells were affected from MEG3 overexpression.(Wang et al. 2012) In our study we reported that 25% of MEG3 downregulated and 2,5% of MEG3 overexpressed cells underwent apoptotic induction. In both our study and previous studies, only a minor fraction of the cell total showed apoptosis indicating a more complicated role of MEG3 in cell death due to its heterogeneous expression in different cells.