Long noncoding RNA UCA1 promotes the proliferation of hypoxic human pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells

Our study explored the effects of lncRNA UCA1 on the proliferation and apoptosis in hypoxic human pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells (HPASMCs) and highlighted the endogenous relationship between UCA1, ING5, and hnRNP I in cell proliferation. Hypoxia-induced HPASMCs were used to simulate pulmonary arterial hypertension in vitro. Microarray assay was adopted to screen the dysregulated expressed lncRNAs in HPASMCs to find out the target gene of our study. And RT-qPCR was performed to detect the expression of lncRNA UCA1 under hypoxia and normoxia. After transfection, the relationship between UCA1 and cell proliferation in HPASMCs under hypoxia were determined by cell proliferation assay and relative expression of PCNA. Next, ELISA assays were conducted to measure the protein levels of PCNA and ING5. What's more, flow cytometry was employed to measure the apoptosis rate in differentially UCA1-expressed HPASMCs. RIP assays were conducted to further clarify the endogenous relationship between UCA1 and ING5 in hypoxic HPASMCs. Finally, the effects of ING5 to HPASMCs were detected after transfection of ING5 and UCA1 to figure out the role of ING5 in HPASMCs. Hypoxia was revealed to induce proliferation and inhibited apoptosis in HPASMCs. Besides, UCA1 was confirmed to be highly expressed under hypoxia compared with normoxia. UCA1 boosted cell proliferation under hypoxia in HPASMCs. However, the apoptosis was suppressed in the hypoxic HPASMCs transfected with pcDNA3.1-UCA1. Further, mechanism studies found that UCA1 competed with ING5 for hnRNP I, so that upregulating UCA1 inhibited the protein levels of ING5. And finally we found that ING5 restrained cell viability, but promoted cell apoptosis in hypoxic HPASMCs, which was reversed by UCA1 over-expression. In summary, our findings manifested that UCA1 promoted proliferation and restrained apoptosis by competing with ING5 for hnRNP I in HPASMCs induced by hypoxia, indicating their potential roles for the cure of hypoxic pulmonary hypertension.