PSME3 promotes lung adenocarcinoma development by regulating the TGF-β/SMAD signaling pathway

Shuai Wang; Yongmeng Li; Kai Jin; Kenichi Suda; Rongyang Li; Huiying Zhang; Hui Tian

doi:10.21037/tlcr-24-340

PSME3 promotes lung adenocarcinoma development by regulating the TGF-β/SMAD signaling pathway

Transl Lung Cancer Res. 2024 Jun 30;13(6):1331-1345. doi: 10.21037/tlcr-24-340. Epub 2024 Jun 26.

Authors

Shuai Wang¹, Yongmeng Li², Kai Jin¹, Kenichi Suda³, Rongyang Li¹, Huiying Zhang¹, Hui Tian^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Thoracic Surgery, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University, Jinan, China.
² Department of Thoracic Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Shandong First Medical University, Jinan, China.
³ Division of Thoracic Surgery, Department of Surgery, Kindai University Faculty of Medicine, Osaka-Sayama, Japan.

Abstract

Background: Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is one of the most common types of cancer worldwide. Proteasome activator subunit 3 (PSME3) is a subunit of a proteasome activator, and changes in PSME3 can lead to the development of many diseases in organisms. However, the specific mechanism of PSME3 in LUAD has not yet been elucidated. This study initially revealed the mechanism of PSME3 promoting the progression of lung adenocarcinoma, which provided a potential molecular target for clinical treatment.

Methods: PSME3 expression in LUAD cells and tissues was assessed by bioinformatics analysis, immunohistochemistry (IHC), Western blotting (WB), and quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). A series of functional experiments were used to evaluate the effects of PSME3 knockdown and overexpression on LUAD cell proliferation, migration, and apoptosis. The potential mechanism of PSME3 was explored by transcriptome sequencing and WB experiments.

Results: In this study, our initial findings indicated that PSME3 expression was abnormally high in LUAD and was associated with poor patient prognosis. Further, we found that the downregulation of PSME3 significantly inhibited LUAD cell proliferation, an effect that was verified by subcutaneous tumor formation experiments in nude mice. Similarly, the rate of invasion and migration of LUAD cells significantly decreased after the downregulation of PSME3. Using flow cytometry, we found that the knockdown of PSME3 caused cell cycle arrest at the G1/S phase. Through transcriptome sequencing, we found that the transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β)/SMAD signaling pathway was closely related to LUAD, and we then validated the pathway using WB assays.

Conclusions: We demonstrated that PSME3 was abnormally highly expressed in LUAD and related to poor patient prognosis; therefore, targeting PSME3 in the treatment of LUAD may represent a novel therapeutic approach.

Keywords: Proteasome activator subunit 3 (PSME3); TGF-β/SMAD signaling pathway; lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD); metastasis; proliferation.