Melatonin enhances DNA repair capacity (in breast cancer cells) possibly by affecting genes involved in DNA damage responsive pathways. - GreenMedInfo Summary
Melatonin enhances DNA repair capacity possibly by affecting genes involved in DNA damage responsive pathways.
BMC Cell Biol. 2013 ;14:1. Epub 2013 Jan 7. PMID: 23294620
Key Laboratory of Environmental Medicine Engineering, Ministry of Education, School of Public Health, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
BACKGROUND: Melatonin, a hormone-like substance involved in the regulation of the circadian rhythm, has been demonstrated to protect cells against oxidative DNA damage and to inhibit tumorigenesis.
RESULTS: In the current study, we investigated the effect of melatonin on DNA strand breaks using the alkaline DNA comet assay in breast cancer (MCF-7) and colon cancer (HCT-15) cell lines. Our results demonstrated that cells pretreated with melatonin had significantly shorter Olive tail moments compared to non-melatonin treated cells upon mutagen (methyl methanesulfonate, MMS) exposure, indicating an increased DNA repair capacity after melatonin treatment. We further examined the genome-wide gene expression in melatonin pretreated MCF-7 cells upon carcinogen exposure and detected altered expression of many genes involved in multiple DNA damage responsive pathways. Genes exhibiting altered expression were further analyzed for functional interrelatedness using network- and pathway-based bioinformatics analysis. The top functional network was defined as having relevance for"DNA Replication, Recombination, and Repair, Gene Expression, [and] Cancer".
CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that melatonin may enhance DNA repair capacity by affecting several key genes involved in DNA damage responsive pathways.