Transcriptome sequencing revealed differences in the response of renal cancer cells to hypoxia and CoCl2 treatment [version 1; referees: 2 approved]

Abstract

Human cancer cells are subjected to hypoxic conditions in many tumours. Hypoxia causes alterations in the glycolytic pathway activation through stabilization of hypoxia-inducible factor 1. Currently, two approaches are commonly used to model hypoxia: an alternative to generating low-oxygen conditions in an incubator, cells can be treated with CoCl2. We performed RNA-seq experiments to study transcriptomes of human Caki-1 cells under real hypoxia and after CoCl2 treatment. Despite causing transcriptional changes of a much higher order of magnitude for the genes in the hypoxia regulation pathway, CoCl2 treatment fails to induce alterations in the glycolysis / gluconeogenesis pathway. Moreover, CoCl2 caused aberrant activation of other oxidoreductases in glycine, serine and threonine metabolism pathways.

Keywords

• Genitourinary Cancers
• Genomics