www.aging-us.com AGING 2019, Vol. 11, No. 24 Research Paper Suppression of FADS1 induces ROS generation, cell cycle arrest, and apoptosis in melanocytes: implications for vitiligo Luyan Tang1, Jian Li1, Wenwen Fu1, Wenyu Wu1, Jinhua Xu1 1Department of Dermatology, Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University, Shanghai 200040, China Correspondence to: Jinhua Xu; email:
[email protected] Keywords: vitiligo, microarray, fatty acid desaturase 1, apoptosis, melanocyte Received: May 6, 2019 Accepted: November 7, 2019 Published: December 21, 2019 Copyright: Tang et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ABSTRACT Vitiligo is a potentially serious condition characterized by loss of melanin and death of melanocytes. To identify potential therapeutic targets for vitiligo, we conducted a microarray analysis of three human vitiligo specimens and paired adjacent normal tissues. Because we found that the fatty acid desaturase 1 (FADS1) gene was downregulated in vitiligo specimens, we carried out experiments to assess its role in melanocyte replication and survival. RT-qPCR was used to verify that FADS1 expression was lower in vitiligo-affected tissues and vitiligo melanocyte PIG3V cells than in matched controls or normal human epidermal PIG1 melanocytes. In addition, CCK-8, immunofluorescence, western blot and flow cytometry assay were used to detect the proliferation and apoptosis in PIG1 cells respectively. Overexpression of FADS1 promoted proliferation of PIG3V melanocytes, while FADS1 silencing inhibited proliferation and induced cell death in PIG1 melanocytes.