1. ¹Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA, USA
2. ²Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA

Correspondence: Dr J Liu, Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto Health Care System (154P), 3801 Miranda Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA. E-mail: Jingwen.Liu@med.va.gov

³These authors contributed equally to this work.

Received 27 October 2006; Revised 5 February 2007; Accepted 6 February 2007; Published online 19 March 2007.

Abstract

The prometastatic oncogene synuclein- (SNCG) is not expressed in normal lung tissues, but it is highly expressed in lung tumors. Here, we show that cigarette smoke extract (CSE) has strong inducing effects on SNCG gene expression in A549 lung cancer cells through demethylation of SNCG CpG island. CSE treatment also augments the invasive capacity of A549 cells in an SNCG-dependent manner. To elucidate the mechanisms underlying the demethylating effects of CSE, we examined expression levels of DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs), 1, 3A and 3B in CSE-treated cells. We show that the mRNA expression of DNMT3B is specifically downregulated by CSE with a kinetics concurrent to SNCG reexpression. Utilizing siRNA to knockdown DNMT3B expression, we show that inhibition of DNMT3B directly increases SNCG mRNA expression. We further show that exogenous overexpression of DNMT3B in an SNCG-positive lung cancer cell line H292 suppresses SNCG mRNA and protein expression and induces de novo methylation of SNCG CpG island, whereas overexpression of DNMT1 or DNMT3A has no effects. Taken together, these new findings demonstrate that tobacco exposure induces the abnormal expression of SNCG in lung cancer cells through downregulation of DNMT3B. This work sheds light on the molecular understanding of demethylation of this oncogene during cancer progression.