Analysis of Aurora kinases genes expression points on their distinct roles in prostate cancer development

Abstract

Aurora kinases A and B play a crucial role in the regulation of mitosis, while Aurora C controls meiotic division. These proteins showed controversial behavior upon the development of epithelial tumors. Our aim was to examine if there are any differences in expression of Aurora kinases genes in malignant and non-malignant tumors and non-tumor tissues; to compare their expression with clinical characteristics of patients and expression of other prostate cancer-associated genes. Quantitative RT-PCR was used to determine Aurora A-C genes expression in 33 prostate adenocarcinomas (T), paired conventionally normal tissues (N), and 17 ade­nomas (A). Relative expression values (RE) for genes studied were estimated using 2-ΔCt and 2-ΔΔCt method. The Kruskal-Wallis with correction on multiple comparisons, according to the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure with FDR = 0.2, Dunn-Bonferroni post hoc test and Spearman rank correlation analysis were used for statistical analysis. As turned out, RE values for AURKA were found to be significantly lower in samples of T group in comparison with A group. Moreover, significant up-regulation of AURKC expression levels were detected for T 3-4 stage compared to T 1-2 stage. RE values of AURKC in T group were positively correlated with the tumor stage, while AURKB RE demonstrated a negative correlation with the tumor stage. We also found significant correlations between AURK genes expression levels and prostate cancer-associated genes in T group. We suppose that all these data point to probable involvement of Aurora kinases’ genes in prostate carcinogenesis.

Keywords

• aurora kinases
• emt genes
• prostate cancer
• pten expression
• tmprss2-erg fusion transcript