RIPOR2 promotes multinucleation of melanoma cells downstream of the RAS/ERK oncogenic pathway

One-third of skin melanomas arise from melanocytic nevi, benign skin lesions composed of clustered melanocytes. Benign nevi are associated with overactivation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase RAS/ERK pathway, resulting from driver mutations, most commonly in the BRAF or NRAS gene. However, this overactivation in melanocytes is insufficient to induce melanoma formation, as only a minority of benign nevi give rise to melanoma. Overactivation of the RAS/ERK pathway promotes genetic and epigenetic alterations by inducing aneuploidy, but the processes by which nevi evolve into melanoma via RAS/ERK pathway-dependent aneuploidy are only partially understood. Using single-nucleus RNA sequencing after overactivation of the RAS/ERK pathway in the chicken embryo, we discovered that RIPOR2 is a positive transcriptional target of this pathway, including in melanocyte precursors. Similar transcriptional control of RIPOR2 by RAS/ERK is conserved in human melanoma cells. RIPOR2 emerged as an attractive target because it encodes an atypical RHOA inhibitory protein involved in the development of physiologically multinucleated cell types. Multinucleation in cancer has been shown to promote aneuploidy, which correlates with tumor aggressiveness. We found that RIPOR2 is ectopically expressed in human nevi and skin melanomas and functionally promotes multinucleation in both an animal model and human tumor-derived cells, including melanoma cell lines. Our results suggest that RIPOR2 expression, downstream of RAS/ERK overactivation in skin melanocytes, promotes the emergence of multinucleated cells, a previously overlooked step in melanoma formation.