N⁶-methyladenosine-modified MIB1 promotes stemness properties and peritoneal metastasis of gastric cancer cells by ubiquitinating DDX3X

Peritoneal metastasis (PM), one of the most typical forms of metastasis in advanced gastric cancer (GC), indicates a poor prognosis. Exploring the potential molecular mechanism of PM is urgently necessary, as it has not been well studied. E3 ubiquitin ligase has been widely established to exert a biological function in various cancers, but its mechanism of action in GC with PM remains unknown.

The effect of MIB1 on PM of GC was confirmed in vitro and in vivo. Co-immunoprecipitation (Co-IP) and mass spectrometry demonstrated the association between MIB1 and DDX3X. Western blot, flow cytometry and immunofluorescence determined that DDX3X was ubiquitylated by MIB1 and promoted stemness. We further confirmed that METTL3 promoted the up-regulation of MIB1 by RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP), luciferase reporter assay and other experiments.

We observed that the E3 ubiquitin ligase Mind bomb 1 (MIB1) was highly expressed in PMs, and patients with PM with high MIB1 expression showed a worse prognosis than those with low MIB1 expression. Mechanistically, our study demonstrated that the E3 ubiquitin ligase MIB1 promoted epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) progression and stemness in GC cells by degrading DDX3X. In addition, METTL3 mediated m6A modification to stabilize MIB1, which required the m6A reader IGF2BP2.

Our study elucidated the specific molecular mechanism by which MIB1 promotes PM of GC, and suggested that targeting the METTL3-MIB1-DDX3X axis may be a promising therapeutic strategy for GC with PM.