Introduction
Prostate cancer, which is one of the most common causes of cancer death in men, estimated new cases of nearly 1.4 million and induced 375,000 deaths around the world, second only to lung cancer [
1]. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the early diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer through widespread screening based on Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA), the application of multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI), and the use of composite predictive indicators, such as the Prostate Health Index (PHI) [
2‐
4]. Current clinical treatments for PCa includes active surveillance, surgical procedure, radiation therapy, androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) and chemotherapy [
5]. For hormone sensitive PCa (HSPC), known as the early stage of PCa, ADT to inhibit the androgen receptor pathways is always the first-line treatment, but even until today, the clinical efficacy of ADT is still not satisfactory and results in a castration-resistant PCa which is the incurable stage of PCa [
6]. Provided numerous side effects of ADT, such as obesity, osteoporosis and muscle loss, it is clinically necessary to develop alternative drugs to treat HSPC without hormonal disruption [
7].
Given that a large majority of clinical cancer suppress drugs are known to be derived from herbs, great attention has been paid to natural products due to their valuable anti-tumor bioactivities and clinically translational potential [
8]. Danshen, dried root of a famous Chinese herb, Salvia miltiorrhiza, is an important traditional medicine in China, which is expected to have variety of therapeutic effects on cardiovascular system [
9]. Many bioactive compounds have been discovered in the extraction of Danshen, including cryptotanshinone, Tanshinone I, Tanshinone IIA and Tanshinone IIB. Among the above tanshinone molecules, Tanshinone IIA is the most abundant and the most investigated lipophilic tanshinone component [
10]. Tanshinone IIA has been established to have diverse bioactive properties, including anti-oxidation [
11], anti-apoptosis [
12] and anti-inflammation [
13] abilities. Recent studies focusing on its tumor suppression effects have also reported the anti-proliferative potential of Tanshinone IIA to HSPC through androgen receptor inhibition [
14,
15], cell cycle arrest, p53 signaling activation, PI3K/AKT pathway inhibition and endoplasmic reticulum stress [
16‐
18]. Chemical modified derivatives based on the structure of Tanshinone IIA have been effectively designed aiming at the treatment of prostate cancer [
19,
20]. However, comprehensive investigations such as transcriptomic studies on the anti-HSPC mechanism of Tanshinone IIA are still lacking, which impeded the development of Tanshinone IIA derives and its potential clinical application.
In the present study, a most universally investigated HSPC cell line, LNCaP, was treated with Tanshinone IIA and a transcriptomic study was afterwards conducted. With Tanshinone IIA induced transcriptomic effects identified, bioinformatic analysis and molecular dynamics evaluation revealed the potential role of PPARγ (PPARG) in the anti-HSPC activity of Tanshinone IIA. Our study indicated a reasonable mechanism of Tanshinone IIA against HSPC and provided a theoretical basis for further utilization of this classic natural product.
Methods
Cell culture and reagents
Human androgen-dependent prostate cancer cell line LNCaP was obtained from American-Type Culture Collection (ATCC). LNCaP cells were cultured using Roswell Park Memorial Institute 1640 medium (RPMI-1640, Gibco) and supplemented with 10% Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS, Gibco) under the condition of 37 ℃ and 5% CO2. Tanshinone IIA (Macklin) was dissolved in dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), adjusted to 2.5 mg/ml and store at -80℃.
Cell viability assay and colony formation assay
According to the previous study conducted by other investigators, Tanshinone IIA has a half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of 2.5 μg/ml to LNCaP cells within 24 h [
16], and we followed the pre-existed IC50 to treat the LNCaP cells 24 h with a 2.5 μg/ml Tanshinone IIA in our subsequent studies. 2000 LNCaP cells were seeded in a 96 well cell culture plate under the condition of 37℃ and 5% CO2 for 24 h and cultured with 2.5 μg/ml Tanshinone IIA for another 48 h. Cell Counting Kit-8 (Beyotime) was used to analyze the cell viability according to the manufacturer’s protocol. For colony formation assay, 200 LNCaP cells were seeded in a 6 well cell culture plate for 24 h and cultured with 2.5 μg/ml Tanshinone IIA for 7 days. Cells were fixed with 4% formaldehyde and dyed with crystal violet to observe the colony formation. Data were presented as mean ± sd, and
t test was applied to evaluate the statistical significance.
Tanshinone IIA treatment and total RNA extraction
LNCaP cells were seeded in a 6 well cell culture plate with 2 ml medium in each well. 2.5 mg/ml DMSO dissolved Tanshinone IIA solution was diluted with RMPI-1640 medium to obtain a working Tanshinone IIA solution of a concentration of 2.5 μg/ml. Medium were changed into working solution at the time when the growth of LNCaP cells reached about 80% confluency and 0.1% DMSO was set as control. After 24 h, total RNA was harvest using commercial extraction kits (RNAeasy™ Plus, Beyotime) following the manufacturer’s instructions. Briefly, LNCaP cells were lysed and centrifuged to remove cell debris, and buffers of different functions were sequentially added, and total RNA was consequently dissolved in RNase-free water and stored at -80℃.
RNA sequencing
For total RNA extraction, the concentration and integrity number of RNA were acquired applying Fragment Analyzer 5400 (Agilent, USA) for further process. mRNA was enriched and purified by oligo(dT)-modified magnetic beads and subsequently segmented by reagents under appropriate conditions. Single strand and double strand cDNA fragments were synthesized with poly-A tail added. After end repair and circularization, cDNA library was established as single strand DNA and then amplified into DNA nanoballs. Sequencing process was conducted using the platform of BGIseq500 (BGI-Shenzhen, China) to get single end 50 bases reads.
Quality control and filtering
Raw reads were obtained and the quality control process was then performed applying the filtering platform SOAPnuke (BGI-Shenzhen, China). For reads filtering and quality control, we followed the below steps: 1) eliminate the reads with the adaptor contained (adaptor pollution); 2) exclude reads with an unknown base content ratio greater than 5%; and 3) eliminate reads with the proportion of bases with a quality score less than 15 greater than 20%. The filtered reads were then processed to bioinformatic analysis.
To further investigating the clinical significance of Tanshinone IIA-induced transcriptomic alteration, 553 transcriptomic data and the corresponding clinical information were obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA–PRAD,
https://portal.gdc.cancer.gov/). R software 4.2.1 was applied for analysis and visualization. For Progress-Free Interval (PFI) analysis, we employed R pack survival [3.3.1], survminer, ggplot2[3.3.6] and Log-rank test; for expression difference analysis, we used R pack ggplot2[3.3.6], stats [4.2.1], car [3.1–0] and Kruskal–Wallis test (if not applicable, Mann–Whitney
U test would be used).
P < 0.05 was considered as statistical significantly.
Molecular docking
AutoDock Vina 1.1.2 software was applied to calculate the binding mode of Tanshinone IIA to PPARA, PPARG and STAT1. The crystal structure of PPARA, PPARG and STAT1 were obtained from Protein Data Bank database (
https://www.rcsb.org/), with the corresponding PDB ID 3ET1, 7AWD and 7NUF. The solvent and original ligands were removed, with the hydrogen atoms the atomic charges added. Tanshinone IIA structure obtained from PubChem database were energy minimized, atomic charges added to facilitate the docking process. For PPARA and STAT1, we set the grid box with the size of 30 × 30 × 30 Å
3, including the existed active binding sites, and for STAT1, we predicted the molecular cavity using Discovery Studio Visualizer 20.1 as the active binding site. All the protein and chemical structures were converted into PDBQT format by AutoDock Tools 1.5.6 before molecular docking and the non-bond interactions were analyzed by Discovery Studio Visualizer 20.1.
Molecular dynamics
The original structure of the Tanshinone IIA–protein complex was used as the starting point for conducting whole-atomic molecular dynamics simulations, employing AMBER v.18 [
22]. Prior to the simulations, we obtained the charges of the small molecules using the Hartree–Fock (HF) SCF/6-31G* calculations performed using the software antechamber module and Gaussian 09 [
23,
24]. Following the charge calculation, we described the small molecules and proteins using the GAFF2 small molecule force field and ff14SB protein force field, respectively [
25,
26]. For each system, the LEaP module was utilized to add hydrogen atoms, and a truncated octahedral TIP3P solvent box was placed at a distance of 10 Å from the system [
27]. Na + and Cl- ions were added to the system to balance the overall charge. Finally, topology and parameter files required for the simulations were generated.
Molecular dynamics simulations were performed using AMBER v.18 software [
22]. Prior to the simulations, the system underwent energy optimization, which involved 2500 steps of steepest descent method followed by 2500 steps of conjugate gradient method. This optimization process aimed to minimize the energy of the system.
After the energy optimization, a 200 ps ramp-up simulation was conducted to gradually increase the system temperature from 0 K to 298.15 K at a fixed volume and a constant ramp-up rate. This step allowed the system to equilibrate slowly and reach the desired simulation temperature. Subsequently, a 500 ps NVT (constant number of particles, volume, and temperature) simulation was performed at 298.15 K to further distribute the solvent molecules uniformly within the solvent box.
Following the NVT simulation, an equilibrium simulation of 500 ps was carried out for the entire system under NPT (constant number of particles, pressure, and temperature) conditions. In addition, two composite systems were simulated for 50 ns each under NPT tethering with periodic boundary conditions.
During the simulations, a non-bond truncation distance of 10 Å was set. The Particle Mesh Ewald (PME) method was employed to calculate long-range electrostatic interactions [
28]. The SHAKE method was utilized to constrain the bond lengths of hydrogen atoms [
29]. Temperature control was achieved using the Langevin algorithm, with a collision frequency (γ) set to 2 ps
−1. The system pressure was maintained at 1 atm, and the integration step was set to 2 fs. Trajectories were saved at 10 ps intervals for subsequent analysis [
30].
Molecular mechanics with generalized Born and surface area solvation (MM/GBSA) calculation
The binding-free energy of the protein–ligand complex for all systems was calculated based on the MM/GBSA method [
31‐
33]. The present calculation is based on the molecular motion trajectory at 45–50 ns in the aforementioned molecular dynamics simulation, using the following equation:
$${\mathbf{\Delta G}}_{{{\mathbf{bind}}}} = \, {\mathbf{\Delta G}}_{{{\mathbf{complex}}}} {-} \, \left( {{\mathbf{\Delta G}}_{{{\mathbf{receptor}}}} + \, {\mathbf{\Delta G}}_{{{\mathbf{ligand}}}} } \right) \, = \, {\mathbf{\Delta E}}_{{{\mathbf{internal}}}} + \, {\mathbf{\Delta E}}_{{{\mathbf{VDW}}}} + \, {\mathbf{\Delta E}}_{{{\mathbf{elec}}}} + \, {\mathbf{\Delta G}}_{{{\mathbf{GB}}}} + \, {\mathbf{\Delta G}}_{{{\mathbf{SA}}}}$$
(1)
In Eq. (
1),
ΔEinternal represents the internal energy,
ΔEVDW represented van der Waals interaction and
ΔEelec represented electrostatic interaction. The internal energy included the bond energy (Ebond), angular energy (Eangle), and torsion energy (Etorsion); In this study, the solvation-free energy was determined by considering both the polar solvation-free energy (
ΔGGB) and the nonpolar solvation-free energy (
ΔGSA). The polar solvation-free energy,
ΔGGB, was calculated applying the GB model (igb = 2) developed by Nguyen et al. [
34]. On the other hand, the nonpolar solvation-free energy,
ΔGSA, was determined based on the data of the surface tension (γ) and the solvent accessible surface area (SASA). The equation used to calculate
ΔGSA was
ΔGSA = 0.0072 × SASA [
35]. It is worth noting that, in this study, we neglected the entropy variation due to the high computational resource requirements and the relatively low accuracy associated with including entropy calculations [
31].
Discussion
Salvia miltiorrhiza (Danshen), a kind of famous traditional Chinese herb, is believed to treat diabetic angiopathy, organ fibrosis and Alzheimer's disease, and is widely and clinically applied by traditional Chinese medical care providers in the management of cardiovascular diseases, such as coronary artery disease [
36‐
38]. Researchers have been extracting many promising chemical components, among which a series of lipophilic molecules named Tanshinone showed a great pharmacological potential [
39]. Tanshinone IIA, a member of tanshinone family, is the most concerned Tanshinone compound in recent years because of its high content in Salvia miltiorrhiza [
40]. Tanshinone IIA has been proved to be multi-functional which features the potential of inflammation suppressing, oxidative stress relieving and cardiovascular improving [
39]. In addition to the effects on cardiovascular, endocrine and nervous systems, recently the anti-prostate cancer especially anti-HSPC potential of Tanshinone IIA has been revealed [
16‐
18,
41‐
43]. Biomolecular mechanism of the HSPC suppression effects has been partially explained by investigators. Won, S. H. et, al. found that Tanshinone IIA can inhibit the proliferation and induce the apoptosis of LNCaP cell line (HSPC) by working as a PI3K/AKT pathway antagonist, which can suppress the surviving signals delivered by PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway [
17]. Tanshinone IIA exhibits cytotoxic effect on LNCaP cell line and LNCaP xenograft by induction of endoplasmic reticulum stress, p53 signaling activation and androgen receptor inhibition, and results in cellular cycle arrest at G0/G1 phase [
16,
18]. However, there is still much to learn how Tanshinone IIA affects the viability of HSPC, and a comprehensive understanding based on transcriptomic level is in need for further exploitation of Tanshinone IIA.
In the present study, we established the anti-HSPC effect of Tanshinone IIA by CCK-8 cell viability assay after treating LNCaP cells with 2.5 μg/ml Tanshinone IIA solution, and then performed an mRNA sequencing to get a comprehensive understanding of Tanshinone IIA induced transcriptomic changes. According to the transcriptomic assay, we identified 339 downregulated genes and 336 upregulated genes with |Log2 fold change|≥ 1 and
p value < 0.05. For further speculating the mechanism of transcriptomic change, we predicted the potential transcription factors of which the function interfered may result in the present transcriptomic changes using online predictor DAVID, and obtained 125 relative transcription factors. Applying pharmacophore-based target fishing system and molecular docking with dynamic simulation, we finally considered that Tanshinone IIA was most likely to interact with PPARG and lead to growth inhibition of LNCaP cells according to the affinity score and dynamic results. Few studies have demonstrated the effect of Tanshinone IIA on PPARG, which seems to be inconsistent [
44,
45]. PPARG is well-known for its function in lipid metabolism and Tanshinone IIA can act as a PPARG antagonist with a dissociation constant of 2.562 ± 0.711 μM, and reduced body weight and blood lipid level [
44]. PPARG plays an important role in biological behaviors of prostate cancer. PPARG is a classic transcription factor triggered by ligand, activating lipid signaling by upregulating acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC), fatty acid synthase (FASN) and ATP citrate lyase (ACLY), and promotes the metastatic prostate cancer [
46]. PPARG overexpression also induces the upregulation of AKT3 and triggered mitochondrial ATP synthesis, contributing to prostate cancer progression with elevated energy supplies [
47]. Previous study has considered the development of PPARG antagonist as anti-prostate cancer agent [
48]. According to the binding potential of our results and the PPARG antagonistic effects of Tanshinone IIA in other study [
44], Tanshinone IIA can probably acted as a PPARG antagonist in the inhibition of prostate cancer growth.
The advancement of computer science has significantly advanced the field of medical biology. Through the application of bioinformatics analysis and molecular dynamics simulations, we have successfully established a correlation between the pharmacological effects of Tanshinone IIA and the biological function of PPARG. While our research has yielded certain accomplishments, it is imperative to acknowledge certain limitations that necessitate further refinement. As an exploratory investigation, our study primarily relies on bioinformatics predictions and sequencing data, rendering our exploration at the molecular mechanism level somewhat superficial. Tanshinone IIA is a crucial natural product, and gaining insight into its mechanism of action is pivotal in facilitating further research and its potential application in the development of effective treatments for prostate cancer. However, based on previous research, prostate cancer can develop resistance to small molecule drugs through various mechanisms, such as the secretion of IGF-1 by adipocytes and the regulation of m6a methylation levels [
49,
50]. As a small molecule drug, the potential resistance of prostate cancer to Tanshinone IIA should be a subject of concern in future research. To comprehensively elucidate the actual biological impact of Tanshinone IIA on PPARG, additional molecular biology experiments are required, thus enabling us to better understand the specific mechanism through which Tanshinone IIA combats prostate cancer. Considering that the Tanshinone IIA derivative, Tanshinone IIA Sodium Sulfonate, has been widely used in China without significant reported adverse reactions, there is a promising opportunity to incorporate Tanshinone IIA into clinical oncology efforts in the future [
51].
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