Aggregation-induced emission luminogens reveal cell cycle-dependent telomerase activity in cancer cells

• 作者: Xia Wu Jun Wu Jun Dai Biao Chen Zhe Chen Shixuan Wang Feng Wu Xiaoding Lou Fan Xia
• 来源期刊: 国家科学评论（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（6）
• 所属期刊栏目: Special Topic:Aggregation-Induced Emission
• 页码范围: 64-73
• 页数: 10页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwaa306

摘要

Telomerase acts as an important biomarker for tumor identification,and synthesizes telomeric repeats at the end of chromosome telomeres during the replicative phase of the cell cycle;thus,the expression level of telomerase changes as the cell cycle progresses.TERT mRNA expression and telomerase activity were significantly increased in over 80％ of human cancers from tissue specimens.Although many efforts have been made in detecting the activity of TERT mRNA and active telomerase,the heterogeneous behavior of the cell cycle was overlookeG which might affect the accuracy of the detection results.Herein,the AIEgen-based biosensing systems of PyTPA-DNA and Silole-Rwere developed to detect the cellular level of TERT mRNA and telomerase in different cell cycles.As a result,the fluorescence signal of cancer cells gradually increased from G0/G1,G1/S to S phase.In contrast,both cancer cells arrested at G2/M phase and normal cells exhibited negligible fluorescence intensities.Compared to normal tissues,malignant tumor samples demonstrated a significant turn-on fluorescence signal.Furthermore,the transcriptomics profiling revealed that tumor biomarkers changed as the cell cycle progressed and biomarkers of CA9,TK1 and EGFRwere more abundantly expressed at early S stage.In this vein,our study presented advanced biosensing tools for more accurate analysis of the cell-cycle-dependent activity ofTERT mRNA and active telomerase in dinical tissue samples.