Collectively, these data indicate that miR-137 plays a novel and indispensable role in ferroptosis by inhibiting glutaminolysis and suggest a potential therapeutic approach for melanoma.
This result elucidates a new mechanism for miR-137 in melanoma development and provides a survival indicator and potential therapeutic target for melanoma patients.
Novel data are provided that the miR-137/TBX3/E-cadherin axis plays an important role in melanomagenesis and that miR-137 replacement is a potential therapeutic approach for treating melanomas.
Further found that miR-137 reduced AURKA expression through interaction with its 3' untranslated region (3'UTR) and that miR-137 was negatively correlated with AURKA expression in melanoma specimens.
In summary, our study confirms that miR-137 acts as a tumor suppressor in malignant melanoma and reveals that miR-137 regulates multiple targets including c-Met, YB1, EZH2, and MITF.
In addition, we discovered that the KRAS-variant was enriched in non-acral melanoma (25%), and that miR-137 under expression was significantly associated with melanomas with the KRAS-variant.