Abstract
Cysteine metabolism plays a critical role in cancer cell survival. Cysteine depletion was reported to inhibit tumor growth and induce pancreatic cancer cell ferroptosis. Nevertheless, the effect of cysteine depletion in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) remains to be explored. In this work, we showed that cysteine depletion can induce K562/G01 but not K562 cell death in the form of ferroptosis. However, the glutathione (GSH)/glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPX4) pathways of the two CML cell lines were both blocked after cysteine depletion. This unexpected outcome guided us to perform RNA-Seq to screen the key genes that affect the sensitivity of CML cells to cysteine depletion. Excitingly, thioredoxin reductase 1 (TXNRD1), which related to cell redox metabolism, was significantly upregulated in K562/G01 cells after cysteine depletion. We further inferred that the upregulation is negatively feedback by the enzyme activity decrease of TXNRD1. Then, we triggered the ferroptosis by applying TXNRD1 shRNA and TXNRD1 inhibitor auranofin in K562 cells after cysteine depletion. In summary, we have reason to believe that TXNRD1 is a key regulator involved in the ferroptosis of CML cells induced by cysteine depletion in vitro. These findings highlight that cysteine depletion serves as a potential therapeutic strategy for overcoming chemotherapy resistance CML.