Long noncoding RNA UCA1 predicts a poor prognosis and regulates cell proliferation and migration by repressing p21 and SPRY1 expression in gastric cancer

Abstract Dysregulated expression of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been reported in many types of cancers, indicating that it has important regulatory roles in human cancer biology. Recently, lncRNA UCA1 was shown to be dysregulated in many cancer types, but the detailed mechanisms remain largely unknown. In our study, we found that upregulated UCA1 is associated with poor prognosis in gastric cancer patients. Further experiments revealed that UCA1 knockdown significantly repressed the proliferation and migration both in vitro and in vivo. Moreover, RNA-seq analysis revealed that UCA1 knockdown preferentially affected genes that are linked to cell proliferation, cell cycle and cell migration. Mechanistically, UCA1 promotes cell proliferation progression through repressing p21 and SPRY1 expression by binding to EZH2. We found that UCA1 could mediate the trimethylation of H3K27 in promoters of p21 and SPRY1. To our knowledge, this is the first report showed that the global genes profile of downstream targets of UCA1 in the progression of gastric cancer. Collectively, our data reveals that the important roles of UCA1 in GC oncogenesis.