PARP10 promotes cellular proliferation and tumorigenesis by alleviating replication stress

During carcinogenesis, cells are exposed to increased replication stress due to replication fork arrest at sites of DNA lesions and other difficult to replicate regions. Efficient fork restart and DNA repair are important for cancer cell proliferation. We previously showed that the ADP-ribosyltransferase PARP10 interacts with the replication protein PCNA and promotes lesion bypass by recruiting specialized, non-replicative DNA polymerases. Here, we show that PARP10 is overexpressed in a large proportion of human tumors. To understand the role of PARP10 in cellular transformation, we inactivated PARP10 in HeLa cancer cells by CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene knockout, and overexpressed it in non-transformed RPE-1 cells. We found that PARP10 promotes cellular proliferation and replication fork elongation. Mechanistically, PARP10 overexpression alleviated cellular sensitivity to replication stress by fostering the restart of stalled replication forks. Importantly, mouse xenograft studies indicated that loss of PARP10 reduces the tumorigenesis activity of HeLa cells, while its overexpression results in tumor formation by non-transformed RPE-1 cells. Our findings indicate that PARP10 promotes cellular transformation by alleviating replication stress, and suggest that targeting PARP10 may represent a novel therapeutic approach.