High Glycine Promotes Proliferation and Progression Though Increase of Glutathione Synthesis in Multiple Myeloma

Background: Metabolites in tumor microenvironment have been confirmed to contribute to cancer progression. Our previous untargeted metabolomics study has indicated that glycine was significantly increased in bone marrow and peripheral blood derived from Multiple Myeloma(MM) patients compared with health donors(HD). However, the role of glycine in MM progression and its underling mechanisms remain unclear.

Materials and Methods: Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) was used to detect the concentration of glycine in peripheral blood derived from (25) MM patients and (21) HD. Metabolic flux experiment was performed to explore the distribution of exogenous glycine in MM cell lines ARP1 and 5TGM1. Soft agar colony formation and cell cycle assay were performed to detect MM cells proliferation. 5TGM1 MM mouse models were prepared to examined the effect of glycine on MM in vivo. The unpaired t test was used to evaluate the difference between two different groups. Two-sided Fisher's exact tests were used to assess the associations between glycine abundance and clinical characteristics in MM patients, with a confidence coefficient (confidence interval, CI) of 95%.

Results: Targeted metabolic assay of glycine in peripheral blood confirmed that glycine was significantly higher in MM patients than HD(HD vs. MM patients, 14000 vs. 15200, p=0.047). To explore the role of high glycine in MM progression, the associations between glycine abundance and clinical characteristics were investigated. We found that MM patients with high glycine had significantly higher plasma cells percentage(High glycine vs. Low glycine, 11.00% vs. 27.95, p=0.039) and lower hemoglobin concentration(High glycine vs. Low glycine, 96g/l vs. 77g/l, p=0.016). Moreover, high glycine was found to associate with bone damage(p=0.031). Additionally, colony formation and cell cycle assay results showed Glycine-free RPMI 1640 media inhibited MM cells proliferation. Furthermore, 5TMG1 MM mouse fed with glycine-deficiency fodder had slower progression as compared with 5TMG1 MM mouse fed with normal fodder(p=0.0007). These data suggested that exogenous glycine contributes to MM progression.

To characterize how exogenous glycine is metabolized in MM cells, MM cell lines ARP1 and 5TGM1 were cultured in the presence of uniformly labeled ¹³C-glycine for 2, 4, and 6 hours, then the concentration of glycine metabolism related metabolites in conditional media and MM cells were tested by using LC-MS. As a result, ¹³C-glycine derived GSH was observed in ARP1 as well as 5TGM1, accounting for 37.2% and 52.7% of total GSH after 6 hours of culture, respectively, alternatively, the levels of ¹³C-GSH in both cell lines were up-regulated with the extension of culture time, indicating that exogenous glycine was involved in GSH synthesis in MM cells. Furthermore, addition of GSH(10 uM) to glycine-free RPMI 1640 media recover the proliferation ability of ARP1 and 5TGM1. Interestingly, betaine, a competitive similar of glycine, was found to suppress MM cell proliferation, and addition of GSH partially counteracted the effect of betaine on MM cells.

Conclusion: These findings thus indicate that glycine promotes MM proliferation in vivo and in vitro, and GSH synthesis is the main metabolic pathway contributing to proliferation. Pharmacological blockage of glycine uptake and utilization shows therapeutic potential in MM treatment.