Research Article Methylation-Associated Gene Silencing of RARB in Areca Carcinogens Induced Mouse Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Copyright © 2014 Zi-Lun Lai et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Regarding oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) development, chewing areca is known to be a strong risk factor in many Asian cultures. Therefore, we established an OSCC induced mouse model by 4-nitroquinoline-1-oxide (4-NQO), or arecoline, or both treatments, respectively. These are the main two components of the areca nut that could increase the occurrence of OSCC. We examined the effects with the noncommercial MCGI (mouse CpG islands) microarray for genome-wide screening the DNA methylation aberrant in induced OSCC mice. The microarray results showed 34 hypermethylated genes in 4-NQO plus arecoline induced OSCC mice tongue tissues. The examinations also used methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction (MS-PCR) and bisulfite sequencing to realize the methylation pattern in collected mouse tongue tissues and human OSCC cell lines of differen