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Cytotoxic mechanism of tioconazole involves cell cycle arrest at mitosis through inhibition of microtubule assembly

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Abstract

Tioconazole is one of the drugs used to treat topical mycotic infections. It exhibited severe toxicity during systemic administration; however, the molecular mechanism behind the cytotoxic effect was not well established. We employed HeLa cells as a model to investigate the molecular mechanism of its toxicity and discovered that tioconazole inhibited HeLa cell growth through mitotic block (37%). At the half-maximal inhibitory concentration (≈ 15 μM) tioconazole apparently depolymerized microtubules and caused defects in chromosomal congression at the metaphase plate. Tioconazole induced apoptosis and significantly hindered the migration of HeLa cells. Tioconazole bound to goat brain tubulin (Kd, 28.3 ± 0.5 μM) and inhibited the assembly of microtubules in the in vitro assays. We report for the first time that tioconazole binds near to the colchicine site, based on the evidence from in vitro tubulin competition experiment and computational analysis. The conformation of tubulin dimer was found to be “curved” upon binding with tioconazole in the MD simulation. Tioconazole in combination with vinblastine synergistically inhibited the growth of HeLa cells and augmented the percentage of mitotic block by synergistically inhibiting the assembly of microtubules. Our study indicates that the systemic adverse effects of tioconazole are partly due to its effects on microtubules and cell cycle arrest. Since tioconazole is well tolerated at the topical level, it could be developed as a topical anticancer agent in combination with other systemic anticancer drugs.

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Data availability

Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supplementary Information section at the end of this article. All the data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank NITC and MHRD, Government of India for the financial support in the form of scholarship to Mr. Jomon Sebastian and Infrastructural facilities to Dr. Rathinasamy K.

Funding

Funding was provided by NIT Calicut and Govt. of India.

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  1. School of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Calicut, Kerala, 673601, India

    Jomon Sebastian & Krishnan Rathinasamy

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  1. Jomon Sebastian
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  2. Krishnan Rathinasamy
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JS performed the experiments, analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. KR designed the experiments, provided the resources for the work, critically analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. All the authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Krishnan Rathinasamy.

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Sebastian, J., Rathinasamy, K. Cytotoxic mechanism of tioconazole involves cell cycle arrest at mitosis through inhibition of microtubule assembly. Cytotechnology 74, 141–162 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10616-021-00516-w

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