METTL3 promotes oral squamous cell carcinoma by regulating miR-146a-5p/SMAD4 axis (IMAGE)
Caption
Figure 8: Schematic representation of METTL3-mediated OSCC progression via regulating the miR-146a-5p/SMAD4 axis. Overexpressed METTL3 (an oncogene) in OSCC cells enhances the processing of pri-miR-146a, leading to an increase in mature miR-146a-5p levels. This upregulated miR-146a-5p targets SMAD4 (a tumor-suppressor gene) via miRNA-mRNA binding interactions resulting in reduced SMAD4 protein expression. The reduction in the tumor-suppressor SMAD4 levels contributes to enhanced cell proliferation, colony formation, migration, invasion, and reduced apoptosis in OSCC cells.
Credit
Copyright: © 2025 Jayaprakash et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Usage Restrictions
With credit to the original source.
License
Original content