Metabolic consequences of p300 gene deletion in human colon cancer cells

Metabolite profiling using ¹H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was used to investigate the metabolic changes associated with deletion of the gene for the transcriptional coactivator p300 in the human colon carcinoma cell line HCT116. Multivariate statistical methods were used to distinguish between metabolite patterns that were dependent on cell growth conditions and those that were specifically associated with loss of p300 function. In the absence of serum, wild-type cells showed slower growth, which was accompanied by a marked decrease in phosphocholine concentration, which was not observed in otherwise isogenic cell lines lacking p300. In the presence of serum, several metabolites were identified as being significantly different between the two cell types, including glutamate and glutamine, a nicotinamide-related compound and glycerophosphocholine (GPC). However, in the absence of serum, these metabolites, with the exception of GPC, were not significantly different, leading us to conclude that most of these changes were context dependent. Transcript profiling, using DNA microarrays, showed changes in the levels of transcripts for several enzymes involved in choline metabolism, which might explain the change in GPC concentration. Localized in vivo ¹H NMR measurements on the tumors formed following s.c. implantation of these cells into mice showed an increase in the intensity of the peak from choline-containing compounds in the p300 tumors. These data show that NMR-based metabolite profiling has sufficient sensitivity to identify the metabolic consequences of p300 gene deletion in tumor cells in vitro and in vivo.