Presentation description

Sirtuin 6 (SIRT6) is an enzyme in humans that controls the activity of many cellular pathways. There are conflicting reports about SIRT6's role in cancer with some sources indicating that it protects against cancer and others indicating that it promotes cancer growth. The goal of my project was to determine how sirtuin proteins affect liver cancer cells. We tested HepG2 cells, which are a hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) cell line. We transfected the HepG2 cells with plasmids containing the SIRT6 gene (WT) or a mutant of the SIRT6 gene: H133Y, S10E, G60A, ΔC, or ΔN so that the cells would overexpress the SIRT6 mutant. We conducted the transfections three times each week to obtain results at 24-, 48-, and 72-hours post-transfection. The viability of the cells was measured by MTT assay. We also collected some of the transfected cells to check that they were expressing the SIRT6 proteins using western blot. The importance of this project was to attain more information about SIRT6 in liver cancer to potentially lead to new treatments for this disease.