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Corresponding Author:
T: 08 9346 7636
E: camile.farah@uwa.edu.au
Abstract
Background
The role of alcohol-containing mouthwash as a risk factor for the development of oral
cancer is a subject of conflicting epidemiological evidence in the literature despite alcohol
being a recognised carcinogen. The aim of this study was to use in vitro models to
investigate mechanistic and global gene expression effects of exposure to alcohol-
containing mouthwash.
This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not
been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may
lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as
doi: 10.1111/jop.12704
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Methods
Accepted Article
Two brands of alcohol-containing mouthwash and their alcohol-free counterparts were used
to treat two oral cell lines derived from normal (OKF6-TERT) and dysplastic (DOK) tissues.
Genotoxicity was determined by Comet assay. RNA-seq was performed using the Ion
Torrent platform. Bioinformatics analysis used R/Bioconductor packages with differential
expression using DEseq2. Pathway enrichment analysis used EnrichR with the Wikipathways
and Kegg databases.
Results
Both cell lines displayed dose dependent DNA damage in response to acute exposure to
ethanol and alcohol-containing mouthwashes as well as alcohol-free mouthwashes
reconstituted with ethanol as shown by Comet assay. The transcriptomic effects of alcohol-
containing mouthwash exposure were more complex with significant differential gene
expression ranging from >2000 genes in dysplastic (DOK) cells to <100 genes in normal
(OKF6-TERT) cells. Pathway enrichment analysis in DOK cells revealed alcohol-containing
mouthwashes showed common features between the two brands used including DNA
damage response as well as cancer associated pathways. In OKF6-TERT cells the most
significantly enriched pathways involved inflammatory signalling.
Conclusions
Ethanol itself is not directly mutagenic but exerts its carcinogenic effects through
downstream metabolic products3. Following ethanol consumption, acetaldehyde
accumulates in the upper digestive tract through oxidation of alcohol by microbes, parotid
glands and mucosal cells4. Acetaldehyde is a recognised human carcinogen and has been
shown to form mutagenic DNA adducts as well as interfere with DNA repair mechanisms5.
Polymorphisms in genes involved in acetaldehyde metabolism modulate the cancer risk
associated with ethanol exposure6. Induction of CYP2E1 by ethanol has a number of
carcinogenic effects including the activation of pro-carcinogens (notably tobacco smoke
derived compounds), depletion of retinoic acid and most significantly, the generation of
reactive oxygen species (ROS)3. Formation of ROS leads to a number of genotoxic effects
including DNA damage as well as generation of mutagenic lipid peroxidation products7.
Alcohol exposure may also synergise with other carcinogens including tobacco products by
enhancing the permeability of the mucosa8.
Cell Culture
The cell lines DOK (human mild dysplastic oral keratinocytes) and OKF6-TERT2 (TERT
transfection immortalized normal human keratinocytes) were cultured as previously
reported20. For the transcriptome experiments, the standardised culture conditions were
DMEM/F-12 containing 10% foetal bovine serum (FBS) and 1x Antibiotic-Antimycotic. All
culture media and reagents were from Thermofisher (MA, USA) and Sigma-Aldrich (St. Louis,
USA).
Comet Assay
Cells were seeded at 2x105 cells/well in 12-well plates, incubated overnight, exposed to
treatments or controls in RPMI media for 5 min at 37°C and washed twice with PBS.
Following cell harvesting with TrypLE Express (Thermofisher) the comet assay was
performed essentially as described by Speit and Hartmann21 with the exception that the
lysis buffer included 1% sarkosyl. Duplicate slides were prepared for each sample and
immediately upon staining 50-100 comets per slide were captured using a Zeiss Axiovision
M1 fluorescence microscope (Carl Zeiss AG, Jena, Germany). Comets were analysed using
CometScore™ (TriTek , VA, USA). Percentage tail DNA migration (% Tail intensity) was used
as the statistic of DNA damage evaluation. Representative comet images of OKF6-TERT cells
demonstrating increasing amounts of tail DNA migration indicative of DNA damage are
shown in Figure 1. Controls were RPMI media alone (negative) and 0.3% hydrogen peroxide
(positive).
Prior to further analysis raw reads were quality checked with fastQC R tool and pre-
processed to remove low quality sequence using trimmomatic R tool. The processed reads
were mapped to reference genome hg19 using Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA-MEM)22.
Following the mapping step, the alignment files were analysed with RNA-seQC23 for
descriptive quality control (QC) of the mapped reads. Read count matrices of summarised
data for each gene were generated using HTseq24. Differential gene expression analysis was
performed with the R/Bioconductor package DESeq2 which uses a negative binomial
model25. Analysis was performed using standard parameters with the independent filtering
function enabled to filter genes with low mean normalized counts. Adjusted p-values (Padj)
for multiple testing, using Benjamini-Hochberg to estimate the false discovery rate (FDR),
were calculated for final estimation of DE significance using a 0.05 cutoff.
RESULTS
To monitor gene expression changes in response to chronic mouthwash exposure DOK and
OKF6-TERT cells were exposed to 0.5% v/v mouthwash preparations for 10 minutes twice
daily for 7 days. Treatments for each cell line included a negative control, the alcohol-free
and alcohol-containing mouthwash of each brand. Three independent experiments were
carried out and RNA extracted to perform transcriptome wide expression profiling by
RNAseq. We performed RNAseq on 30 samples with an average read depth of 26.5 million
reads. Pre-processed reads were mapped against the hg19 reference genome with an
average efficiency of 92.6% (range 87.4%-96.6%) with detection of around 30,000
transcripts overall per library. We then performed a pairwise differential expression analysis
between the treatment groups with an overview of differentially expressed gene numbers
and the subsets of up and down regulated genes shown in Table 2. As can be seen there was
a striking difference in the transcriptomic effects of the mouthwashes between the normal
and dysplastic cultures. With the exception of the alcohol-free brand B (B-), the effects were
To explore the biological meaning of the regulated genes we performed statistical analysis
for enrichment of gene ontology (biological processes or molecular function) and biological
pathways (KEGG or Wikipathways databases) using the gene subsets generated by Venn
analysis (Figure 3). In particular, we focussed upon the genes which were differentially
regulated by the alcohol-containing mouthwashes but not the alcohol-free mouthwashes.
Our analysis of gene ontology in these datasets yielded statistically significant enriched
terms especially for experiments involving DOK cells, however, they broadly related to
transcriptional regulation (i.e. transcription factors including ARID5A, SP100, ASCL2 and
DLX4) and did not yield particular biological insight. Therefore, they are not presented here.
For pathway analysis of gene regulation specific to alcohol-containing mouthwashes A+ and
B+ there were 20 and 104 significantly enriched pathways respectively in the treated DOK
cells. The top 10 pathways for each mouthwash are shown in Table 3. As can be seen, two
pathways, viral carcinogenesis (hsa05203) and DNA damage response (WP710), were
common to the most highly ranked pathways for both mouthwash treatments. For analysis
DISCUSSION
The principal aim of this study was to use cellular assays of genotoxicity and RNA-seq to
investigate the in vitro effects of exposure to alcohol-containing and alcohol-free
commercial mouthwashes upon oral keratinocytes. In addition, we also characterised the
different responses between normal and dysplastic cells. The literature in this area is largely
epidemiological and there is a deficiency of in vitro studies which we aimed to address. Our
initial investigation of the genotoxic effects of alcohol and mouthwash preparations showed
a genotoxic effect and were entirely consistent with this effect being exerted by alcohol.
Even a short term acute in vitro exposure resulted in evidence of DNA damage in both OKF6-
TERT and DOK cells as assessed by Comet assay. This is consistent with the in vitro evidence
for DNA damage by ethanol and that it can exert a genotoxic effect additional to that
initiated by its acetaldehyde metabolites 27.
Although it did appear that the magnitude of the DNA damage effect was slightly greater in
DOK cells, overall both cell lines exhibited broadly similar DNA damage effects across a
variety of treatments. In contrast there was a striking difference between OKF6-TERT and
DOK cells with respect to the transcriptomic response. We have previously demonstrated
that DNA damage repair mechanisms are more active in the normal derived OKF6-TERT cells
than in dysplastic derived DOK cells 28 and these findings are consistent with that previous
study. Whether this enhanced sensitivity of dysplastic cells is a feature of similar in vitro
models and can be generalised to in vivo clinical oral epithelial dysplasia requires further
investigation. It does raise the possibility that dysplastic tissue is more susceptible to
Overall the transcriptomic responses across the experiments were diverse in magnitude
with distinct responses seen, not only between the cell lines, but also differentially between
the mouthwash brands. Given the differences in composition across the brands these
differences are not unexpected although the complex composition does make dissection of
the effects problematic. We did not see significant differential expression in comparisons of
the alcohol-containing and alcohol-free preparations within each brand. However, the
composition differences other than alcohol may have had a confounding effect.
Pathway analysis demonstrated that in DOK cells treated with the alcohol-containing
mouthwashes the specifically regulated genes were enriched for many pathways associated
with carcinogenesis and DNA damage response. Several pathways were found common to
the two mouthwash brands indicating a commonality of biological effects even if the
common gene numbers (101 by Venn analysis) were relatively low. Notably this included the
DNA damage response pathway which is consistent with the genotoxic effects seen in the
Comet assay. The absence of such a finding in the transcriptome of OKF6-TERT cells may
reflect the differences in DNA damage response in these cells as previously reported by us28.
The 3 significant pathways enriched in OKF6-TERT cells treated with Brand A+ all related to
inflammatory signalling and indicate distinct biological effects between the cell lines.
Despite the large number of genes regulated by the alcohol-free mouthwashes A- in DOK
cells and B- in OKF6-TERT cells, we did not identify enrichment of specific biological
pathways. Since the results of the cellular assays indicate an absence of genotoxicity further
investigation of the individual components of these mouthwashes would be required to
elucidate this effect.
The data we present here provides insight into the biological and gene regulatory
mechanisms underlying the effects of alcohol-containing mouthwash on oral epithelial cells.
Whether these in vitro findings are reflected by similar in vivo effects requires further
investigation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank Stephen Rudd, Roxane Legaie and Anne Bernard from the Queensland
Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics (QFAB) for assistance with bioinformatics analysis and
Richard Allcock (LotteryWest State Biomedical Facility Genomics, Western Australia) for next
generation sequencing. This study was supported by grants from The Queensland
Government Smart Futures Co-investment Fund, Cancer Australia, Agilent Technologies, Life
Technologies and The Australian Dental Research Foundation awarded to CSF.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
None to declare.
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FIGURE 2 Percentage tail intensity in OKF6-TERT and DOK cells exposed to (A) varying
concentrations of ethanol, (B) Brand A mouthwash preparations, (C) Brand B mouthwash
preparations, (D) comparison of Brand A and Brand B alcohol containing mouthwash only.
Positive control (Pos.) is 0.3% H2O2. Figures are Tukey-style boxplots showing median and
outliers. Each bar represents a single experiment comprising 50-100 comets.
FIGURE 3 Venn analysis of differentially expressed genes in (A) DOK cells and (B) OKF6-TERT
cells.
B+ vs B- 4 (0/4) 6 (1/5)