Abstract
Hypoxia has been implicated as a crucial microenvironmental factor that induces cancer metastasis. We previously reported that hypoxia could promote gastric cancer (GC) metastasis, but the underlying mechanisms are not clear. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have recently emerged as important regulators of carcinogenesis that act on multiple pathways. However, whether lncRNAs are involved in hypoxia-induced GC metastasis remains unknown. In this study, we investigated the differentially expressed lncRNAs resulting from hypoxia-induced GC and normoxia conditions using microarrays and validated our results through real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction. We found an lncRNA, AK058003, that is upregulated by hypoxia. AK058003 is frequently upregulated in GC samples and promotes GC migration and invasion in vivo and in vitro. Furthermore, AK058003 can mediate the metastasis of hypoxia-induced GC cells. Next, we identified γ-synuclein (SNCG), which is a metastasis-related gene regulated by AK058003. In addition, we found that the expression of SNCG is positively correlated with that of AK058003 in the clinical GC samples used in our study. Furthermore, we found that the SNCG gene CpG island methylation was significantly increased in GC cells depleted of AK058003. Intriguingly, SNCG expression is also increased by hypoxia, and SNCG upregulation by AK058003 mediates hypoxia-induced GC cell metastasis. These results advance our understanding of the role of lncRNA-AK058003 as a regulator of hypoxia signaling, and this newly identified hypoxia/lncRNA-AK058003/SNCG pathway may help in the development of new therapeutics.