Citation

  • Authors: Xie J. et al.
  • Year: 2022
  • Journal: Nat Chem Biol 18 1341-1350
  • Applications: in vitro / DNA / jetOPTIMUS
  • Cell types:
    1. Name: HEK-293T
      Description: Human embryonic kidney Fibroblast
      Known as: HEK293T, 293T
    2. Name: LNCaP
      Description: Human prostate carcinoma cells

Method

Transfection of plasmids into LNCaP cells was performed using jetOPTIMUS (Polyplus, 117-15) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Repair templates were cloned into pUC57 vector containing mEGFP/mNeon-Green, a GGS linker and 800-bp homology arms flaking the insert. LNCaP/HEK-293T cells were co-transfected with 1 µg CRISPR-v2 vector and 1 µg donor templates using jetOPTIMUS according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Abstract

Patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer inevitably acquire resistance to antiandrogen therapies in part because of androgen receptor (AR) mutations or splice variants enabling restored AR signaling. Here we show that ligand-activated AR can form transcriptionally active condensates. Both structured and unstructured regions of AR contribute to the effective phase separation of AR and disordered N-terminal domain plays a predominant role. AR liquid-liquid phase separation behaviors faithfully report transcriptional activity and antiandrogen efficacy. Antiandrogens can promote phase separation and transcriptional activity of AR-resistant mutants in a ligand-independent manner. We conducted a phase-separation-based phenotypic screen and identified ET516 that specifically disrupts AR condensates, effectively suppresses AR transcriptional activity and inhibits the proliferation and tumor growth of prostate cancer cells expressing AR-resistant mutants. Our results demonstrate liquid-liquid phase separation as an emerging mechanism underlying drug resistance and show that targeting phase separation may provide a feasible approach for drug discovery.

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