IMR Press / FBL / Volume 27 / Issue 6 / DOI: 10.31083/j.fbl2706173
Open Access Original Research
Epirubicin Alters DNA Methylation Profiles Related to Cardiotoxicity
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1 Department of Toxicogenomics, GROW School for Oncology and Reproduction, Maastricht University, 6229ER Maastricht, The Netherlands
2 Department of Computational Molecular Biology, Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics, 14195 Berlin, Germany
*Correspondence: nhan.nguyen@maastrichtuniversity.nl (Nhan Nguyen)
Academic Editors: Tatsuya Akutsu and TSUI Kwok Wing Stephen
Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2022, 27(6), 173; https://doi.org/10.31083/j.fbl2706173
Submitted: 25 February 2022 | Revised: 25 April 2022 | Accepted: 26 April 2022 | Published: 1 June 2022
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Abstract

Background: Epirubicin (EPI) is an important anticancer drug that is well-known for its cardiotoxic side effect. Studying epigenetic modification such as DNA methylation can help to understand the EPI-related toxic mechanisms in cardiac tissue. In this study, we analyzed the DNA methylation profile in a relevant human cell model and inspected the expression of differentially methylated genes at the transcriptome level to understand how changes in DNA methylation could affect gene expression in relation to EPI-induced cardiotoxicity. Methods: Human cardiac microtissues were exposed to either therapeutic or toxic (IC20) EPI doses during 2 weeks. The DNA and RNA were collected from microtissues in triplicates at 2, 8, 24, 72, 168, 240, and 336 hours of exposure. Methylated DNA immunoprecipitation-sequencing (MeDIP-seq) analysis was used to detect DNA methylation levels in EPI-treated and control samples. The MeDIP-seq data were analyzed and processed using the QSEA package with a recently published workflow. RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) was used to measure global gene expression in the same samples. Results: After processing the MeDIP-seq data, we detected 35, 37, 15 candidate genes which show strong methylated alterations between all EPI-treated, EPI therapeutic and EPI toxic dose-treated samples compared to control, respectively. For several genes, gene expressions changed compatibly reflecting the DNA methylation regulation. Conclusions: The observed DNA methylation modifications provide further insights into the EPI-induced cardiotoxicity. Multiple differentially methylated genes under EPI treatment, such as SMARCA4, PKN1, RGS12, DPP9, NCOR2, SDHA, POLR2A, and AGPAT3, have been implicated in different cardiac dysfunction mechanisms. Together with other differentially methylated genes, these genes can be candidates for further investigations of EPI-related toxic mechanisms. Data Repository: The data has been generated by the HeCaToS project (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies) under accession numbers S-HECA433 and S-HECA434 for the MeDIP-seq data and S-HECA11 for the RNA-seq data. The R code is available on Github (https://github.com/NhanNguyen000/MeDIP).

Keywords
DNA methylation
epirubicin
MeDIP-seq
toxicogenomics
side effect
Figures
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