TERRA G-quadruplex stabilization behind the anti-multiple myeloma activity: Novel insights about resveratrol pleiotropic effects

Resveratrol (RSV) is a nutraceutical compound belonging to the nonflavonoid polyphenol family, whose antioxidants, anti-inflammatory, and antitumoral properties have been widely investigated. The ability of RSV to provide beneficial effects for neurological, cardiovascular, and cancer disorders rekindled the interest to explore the molecular mechanisms behind its pleiotropic effects, which are due to the modulation of coding and noncoding genes involved in many key biological pathways. With a computational approach, including docking studies and thermodynamics calculations followed by 200-ns-long molecular dynamics and a clustering analysis, we hypothesized the stabilizing binding between RSV and G4 structures of telomeric repeat-containing RNA (TERRA), which is a tumor-suppressive long noncoding RNAs (lncRNA) involved in the regulation of telomere maintenance. In vitro studies performed on cellular models of multiple myeloma (MM) strengthened our hypothesis by highlighting that the antiproliferative and apoptotic effect induced by the treatment with RSV is associated with an increase of TERRA transcript and with upregulation of telomeric heterochromatin markers, such as H3K27Me3 and H4K20Me3, and of the hallmark of apoptosis, cleaved-poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1. Our results propose innovative insights underlying the multifaceted role of RSV in MM, by pointing out the role of this natural compound in an lncRNA-mediated regulation to counteract cellular immortality.