Bioinformatics Analysis of C3 in Brain Low Grade Gliomas as Potential Therapeutic Target and Promoting Immune Cell Infiltration
Abstract Background Low grade gliomas is the malignant nervous tumor with distinct biological and clinical characteristics. Despite advances in diagnostic and therapeutic methods, how to significantly elongate the survival of low grade gliomas is still the challenge. Complement 3, as the critical component in the innate immune system, play an essential role in local immune response and participated into the regulation of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition and tumor microenvironment. Methods In this study, we systematically determined the expression levels of C3 in low grade gliomas using various public databases. Then, we further identified the impact of C3 expression on immune cell infiltration compared to normal tissue, indicating the effect of cellular microenvironment on overall survival of LGG patients. Results We obtained transcriptional and survival of C3 in LGG from GEPIA and cBioportal database, and the differentially expressed genes were obtained. By performing the analysis of GO and protein-protein interaction network, we have identified the top-ranked 10 hub genes, which are highly associated with regulation of cell cycle. The gene set enrichment analysis demonstrated that overexpression of C3 in LGG patient is positively correlated with regulation of cell cycle. Finally, the immune cell infiltration of C3 in LGG patients was employed and clearly showed that higher neutrophil infiltration can worsen the survival of LGG patients with higher C3 expression. These results were confirmed by the Human Protein Atlas database, in which expression level of C3 protein in gliomas patients always higher. Conclusions This investigation implied that C3 can be as the potential targets of precise therapy for patient with low grade gliomas.