Estrogen and retinoic acid antagonistically regulate several microRNA genes to control aerobic glycolysis in breast cancer cells.

In addition to estrogen receptor modulators, retinoic acid and other retinoids are promising agents to prevent breast cancer. Retinoic acid and estrogen exert antagonistic regulations on the transcription of coding genes and we evaluated here whether these two compounds have similar effects on microRNAs. Using an integrative approach based on several bioinformatics resources together with experimental validations, we indeed found that retinoic acid positively regulates miR-210 and miR-23a/24-2 expressions and is counteracted by estrogen. Conversely, estrogen increased miR-17/92 and miR-424/450b expressions and is inhibited by retinoic acid. In silico functional enrichment further revealed that this combination of transcriptional/post-transcriptional regulations fully impacts on the molecular effects of estrogen and retinoic acid. Besides, we unveiled a novel effect of retinoic acid on aerobic glycolysis. We specifically showed that it increases extracellular lactate production, an effect counteracted by the miR-210 and the miR-23a/24-2, which simultaneously target lactate dehydrogenase A and B mRNAs. Together our results provide a new framework to better understand the estrogen/retinoic acid antagonism in breast cancer cells.