www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/ Oncotarget, Vol. 7, No. 18 Tumor suppressor Spred2 interaction with LC3 promotes autophagosome maturation and induces autophagy-dependent cell death Ke Jiang1,*, Min Liu1,*, Guibin Lin2, Beibei Mao3, Wei Cheng1, Han Liu1, Jozsef Gal4, Haining Zhu4, Zengqiang Yuan3, Wuguo Deng1, Quentin Liu1, Peng Gong2, Xiaolin Bi1, Songshu Meng1 1 Institute of Cancer Stem Cell, Dalian Medical University Cancer Center, Dalian, China 2DepartmentofHepatobiliarySurgery,TheFirstAffiliatedHospitalofDalianMedicalUniversity,Dalian,China 3 State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 4 Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, College of Medicine, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA *These authors contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Songshu Meng, e-mail:
[email protected] Xiaolin Bi, e-mail:
[email protected] Keywords: Spred2, LC3, p62/SQSTM1, autophagy, tumor suppressor Received: April 13, 2015 Accepted: March 12, 2016 Published: March 25, 2016 ABSTRACT The tumor suppressor Spred2 (Sprouty-related EVH1 domain-2) induces cell death in a variety of cancers. However, the underlying mechanism remains to be elucidated. Here we show that Spred2 induces caspase-independent but autophagy- dependent cell death in human cervical carcinoma HeLa and lung cancer A549 cells. We demonstrate that ectopic Spred2 increased both the conversion of microtubule- associated protein 1 light chain 3 (LC3), GFP-LC3 puncta formation and p62/SQSTM1 degradation in A549 and HeLa cells. Conversely, knockdown of Spred2 in tumor cells inhibited upregulation of autophagosome maturation induced by the autophagy inducer Rapamycin, which could be reversed by the rescue Spred2. These data suggest that Spred2 promotes autophagy in tumor cells.