Gene amplification driven-long noncoding RNA SNHG17 regulates cell proliferation and migration in human non-small cell lung cancer

Abstract Lung cancer is the most common cancer all around the world with high morbidity and mortality. Long non-coding RNA(LncRNA) has been reported to be a critical role in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) proliferation and migration. In the present study, we analyzed the TCGA data and found that lncRNA SNHG17 was up-regulated in NSCLC driven by the amplification of copy number, indicating the special role of SNHG17 in NSCLC. Full exact length of SNHG17 was determined by RACE. We modulated SNHG17 expression by RNA interference and a series of functional assays were performed. Flow cytometry was used to explore the involvement of SNHG17 in NSCLC cell apoptosis. Results showed that knockdown of SNHG17 inhibited proliferation, migration and promoted apoptosis of NSCLC cells. We acquired the global gene expression profile regulated by SNHG17 in A549 through RNA-Seq assays. We found 637 genes were up-regulated while 581 genes were down-regulated. We selected three genes (FOXA1, XAF1, BIK) which were closely related to proliferation and apoptosis and confirmed their altered expression in A549 and PC-9 treated by si-SNHG17. Our findings indicated gene amplification driven-long noncoding RNA SNHG17 promotes cell proliferation and migration in NSCLC, suggesting its potential value as biomarker in NSCLC.