Department of Neurosurgery, the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210029, China
2.
Department of Neurosurgery, the Affiliated Brain Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210029, China
Funds:
This work is supported by the China Natural Science Foundation (No. 30872657), Jiangsu Province’s Medical Major Talent Foundation (No. RC2007061), Jiangsu Province’s Natural Science Foundation (No. 2008475) and Jiangsu Province’s "333" Key Talent Foundati
MicroRNAs regulate self renewal and differentiation of cancer stem cells. There, we sought to identify the ex-pression of miR-181b in glioma stem cells and investigate the biological effect of miR-181b on glioma stem cells in this study. MiR-181b expression was measured by real-time PCR in glioma stem cells isolated from U87 cells by FACS sorting. After miR-181b was overexpressed in U87 glioma stem cells by miR-181b lentiviral expression vector and/or treatment of temozolomide, secondary neurosphere assay, soft agar colony assay and MTT assay were performed. Compared with U87 cells, the expression of miR-181b was significantly decreased in U87 glioma stem cells. Overexpression of miR-181b decreased neurosphere formation by U87 glioma stem cells in vitro and suppressed colony formation in soft agar, and the cell growth inhibition rates increased in a time-dependent man-ner in U87 glioma stem cells infected with miR-181b lentivirus. Furthermore, miR-181b had a synergistic effect on temozolomide-induced inhibition of secondary neurosphere and soft agar colony, and on cell growth inhibition rates. MiR-181b functions as a tumor suppressor that suppresses proliferation and reduces chemoresistance to te-mozolomide in glioma stem cells.