SP1-induced up-regulation of lncRNA LUCAT1 promotes proliferation, migration and invasion of cervical cancer by sponging miR-181a

Long noncoding RNA lung cancer associated transcript 1 (LUCAT1) has been shown to be a lncRNA that facilitates the development and progression of several tumours. However, the evidence of LUCAT1 modulating the growth and metastasis of cervical cancer (CC) were still lacking. The present study aimed to explore the expression pattern, biological function and potential mechanism of LUCAT1 in CC. In this study, we, first, confirmed that LUCAT1 acted as an up-regulated lncRNA by analyzing the data from GCTA dataset and RT-PCR in both CC tissues and cell lines. We also showed that TINCR overexpression is induced by nuclear transcription factor SP1. Then, clinical assays showed that LUCAT1 was associated with advanced clinical progression and poor prognosis of CC patients. Importantly, multivariate Cox model confirmed that LUCAT1 expression was an independent prognostic factor for both 5-year overall survival in CC. Then, lost-function assays revealed that knockdown of LUCAT1 significantly suppressed CC cells proliferation, colony formation, migration, invasion and EMT by a series of cells experiments. Mechanistically, Bioinformatic tools predicted that miR-181a may target LUCAT1, which was confirmed using luciferase reporter assay and RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP) assays. Overall, our findings showed that SP1-activated LUCAT1 exerts an oncogenic function in CC by binding to miR-181a, suggesting that miR-181a may be a ponderable and promising therapeutic target for CC.