TRAIL receptor gene editing unveils TRAIL-R1 as a master player of apoptosis induced by TRAIL and ER stress

// Florent Dufour 1, 2 , Thibault Rattier 1, 2 , Andrei Alexandru Constantinescu 1, 2 , Luciana Zischler 1, 2, 3 , Aymeric Morle 1, 2 , Hazem Ben Mabrouk 4 , Etienne Humblin 1, 2 , Guillaume Jacquemin 1, 2 , Eva Szegezdi 5 , Fabien Delacote 6 , Naziha Marrakchi 4 , Gilles Guichard 7 , Catherine Pellat-Deceunynck 8 , Pierre Vacher 9 , Patrick Legembre 10 , Carmen Garrido 1, 2, 11 , Olivier Micheau 1, 2, 11 1 INSERM, UMR866, « Equipe labellisee Ligue contre le Cancer » and Laboratoire d’Excellence LipSTIC, Dijon, France 2 Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comte, Dijon, France 3 Pos-graduacao emCiencias da Saude, Escola de Medicina, Pontificia Univ. Catolica do Parana, Curitiba, Parana, Brazil 4 Laboratoire des Venins et Biomolecules Therapeutiques LR11IPT08, Institut Pasteur de Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia 5 Department of Biochemistry and National Centre for Biomedical Engineering Science, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland 6 Cellectis, Paris, France 7 Univ. de Bordeaux, CNRS, IPB, UMR 5248, CBMN, Institut Europeen de Chimie et de Biologie, Pessac, France 8 INSERM, UMR892, CNRS 6299, Universite de Nantes, Nantes, France 9 INSERM U1218, Univ. de Bordeaux, Institut Bergonie, Bordeaux, France 10 CLCC Eugene Marquis, INSERM ER440 Oncogenesis, Stress & Signaling, Rennes, France 11 Centre Georges-Francois Leclerc, Dijon, France Correspondence to: Micheau Olivier, email: olivier.micheau@inserm.fr Keywords: receptor, TRAIL, signaling, apoptosis, cancer Received: September 02, 2016 Accepted: November 30, 2016 Published: December 27, 2016 ABSTRACT TRAIL induces selective tumor cell death through TRAIL-R1 and TRAIL-R2. Despite the fact that these receptors share high structural homologies, induction of apoptosis upon ER stress, cell autonomous motility and invasion have solely been described to occur through TRAIL-R2. Using the TALEN gene-editing approach, we show that TRAIL-R1 can also induce apoptosis during unresolved unfolded protein response (UPR). Likewise, TRAIL-R1 was found to co-immunoprecipitate with FADD and caspase-8 during ER stress. Its deficiency conferred resistance to apoptosis induced by thaspigargin, tunicamycin or brefeldin A. Our data also demonstrate that tumor cell motility and invasion-induced by TRAIL-R2 is not cell autonomous but induced in a TRAIL-dependant manner. TRAIL-R1, on the other hand, is unable to trigger cell migration owing to its inability to induce an increase in calcium flux. Importantly, all the isogenic cell lines generated in this study revealed that apoptosis induced TRAIL is preferentially induced by TRAIL-R1. Taken together, our results provide novel insights into the physiological functions of TRAIL-R1 and TRAIL-R2 and suggest that targeting TRAIL-R1 for anticancer therapy is likely to be more appropriate owing to its lack of pro-motile signaling capability.