Open AccessMPV17 does not control cancer cell proliferation
Author(s) -
Morgane Cane,
Anaïs Wanet,
Thuy Truong An Nguyen,
Alexis Khelfi,
Sophie Ayama-Canden,
Martine Van Steenbrugge,
Antoine Fattaccioli,
Étienne Sokal,
Mustapha Najimi,
Thierry Arnould,
Patricia Renard
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0229834
Subject(s) - gene knockdown , biology , gene silencing , cell growth , small hairpin rna , microbiology and biotechnology , cancer cell , rna interference , mitochondrial dna , cancer , cancer research , genetics , cell culture , gene , rna
MPV17 is described as a mitochondrial inner membrane channel. Although its function remains elusive, mutations in the MPV17 gene result in hepato-cerebral mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome in humans. In this study, we show that MPV17 silencing does not induce depletion in mitochondrial DNA content in cancer cells. We also show that MPV17 does not control cancer cell proliferation despite the fact that we initially observed a reduced proliferation rate in five MPV17-silenced cancer cell lines with two different shRNAs. However, shRNA-mediated MPV17 knockdown performed in this work provided misguiding results regarding the resulting proliferation phenotype and only a rescue experiment was able to shed definitive light on the implication of MPV17 in cancer cell proliferation. Our results therefore emphasize the caution that is required when scientific conclusions are drawn from a work based on lentiviral vector-based gene silencing and clearly demonstrate the need to systematically perform a rescue experiment in order to ascertain the specific nature of the experimental results.