Assessing ribosomal and mitochondrial translation in breast cancer cells treated with metformin

Abstract

Mitochondria are important organelles in a cell that plays a vital role in energy production, metabolism, and cellular apoptosis (Wang et al., 2023). Cancer cells in order to promote cell proliferation, survival from immune attack, and to adapt to harsh conditions and tumor microenvironment are in need to reprogram their metabolism (Mi et al., 2025). One of the hallmarks of cancer cell is dysregulation in mitochondrial and cytosolic translation rates. Cancer cells also under the low oxygen conditions upregulate energy production by OXPHOS (Kim et al., 2017). There, I propose that Metformin widely used as a Type II diabetes drug may alter mitochondrial and cytosolic translation rates in breast cancer cells. Metformin shows anti-cancer effects mainly by inhibiting the mitochondrial respiratory chain complex I, which results in the activation of AMPK (Moldasheva et al., 2025). It is not yet fully understood how metformin alters mitochondrial and cytosolic translation rates in breast cancer cells. Biochemical techniques as Western blotting, subcellular fractionation will be used to examine the effect of metformin on changing the rate of mitochondrial and cytosolic translation in breast cancer cells. This research may be a foundation for understanding metformin metabolic effect in relation to protein translation in the cytoplasm and mitochondria.