miR-221: a critical player in apoptosis as a target of Caspase-3

Caspases are a family of proteases that function as the primary mediators of apoptosis.miR-221 is an oncogenic miRNA that may have both anti-angiogenic and angiogenic effect. The aim of this work was to compare the expression levels of miR-221 and its target caspase-3 in different cancer cell lines and to find out a relationship between these two. We also analyzed binding efficiency of miR-221 to 3’UTR region of CASP3 gene computationally. Our results indicate that expression of caspase-3 is quite lower as compared to miR-221 expression in all of the selected cancer cell lines. Also, our computational results showed that miR-221-3p, of which binding site has two SNPs (rs369703524, C/T; rs189187745, T/A) on CASP3 3’UTR region. As a result, we conclude that miR-221 may have a crucial role in repressing the expression of caspase-3 which may conduce to a lower level of apoptosis, therefore supporting to select more aggressive cancer cells.