scholarly journals Uncovering of the Association Between m5C Regulator-Mediated Methylation Modification Patterns and Tumor Microenvironment Infiltration Characteristics in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Author(s):  
Xinyu Gu ◽  
Haibo Zhou ◽  
Qingfei Chu ◽  
Qiuxian Zheng ◽  
Jing Wang ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: 5-Methylcytosine (m5C) plays essential roles in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but the association between m5C regulation and immune cell infiltration in HCC has not yet been clarified.Methods: In this study, we analysed 371 patients with HCC from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, and the expression of 13 m5C regulators was investigated. Additionally, gene set variation analysis (GSVA), unsupervised clustering analysis, single-sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA), correlation analysis, and immunohistochemical (IHC) staining were performed.Results: Among the 371 patients, 41 had mutations in m5C regulators, the frequency of which was 11.26%. Then, we identified three m5C modification patterns that had obvious tumour microenvironment (TME) cell infiltration characteristics. Cluster-1 had an immune rejection phenotype; Cluster-2 had an immunoinflammatory phenotype; and Cluster-3 had an immune desert phenotype. In addition, we found that DNMT1 was highly expressed in tumour tissues compared with normal tissues in a tissue microarray (TMA) and that it was positively correlated with many TME-infiltrating immune cells. High expression of the m5C regulator DNMT1 was related to a poor prognosis in patients with HCC. Furthermore, we developed three Immu-clusters that were consistent with the immune characteristics of the m5C methylation modification patterns. We also discovered differences in the levels of immune cells and expression of chemokines and cytokines among the three Immu-clusters.Conclusions: Our work revealed the association between m5C modification and immune regulators in the TME. These findings also suggest that DNMT1 has great potential as a prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target for HCC.

Author(s):  
Xinyu Gu ◽  
Haibo Zhou ◽  
Qingfei Chu ◽  
Qiuxian Zheng ◽  
Jing Wang ◽  
...  

Background: 5-Methylcytosine (m5C) plays essential roles in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but the association between m5C regulation and immune cell infiltration in HCC has not yet been clarified.Methods: In this study, we analysed 371 patients with HCC from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, and the expression of 13 m5C regulators was investigated. Additionally, gene set variation analysis (GSVA), unsupervised clustering analysis, single-sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA), correlation analysis, and immunohistochemical (IHC) staining were performed.Results: Among the 371 patients, 41 had mutations in m5C regulators, the frequency of which was 11.26%. Compared with normal hepatic tissues, the expression of m5C regulators with copy number variations (CNVs) expansion was significantly higher than that in HCC tissues. Then, we identified three m5C modification patterns that had obvious tumour microenvironment (TME) cell infiltration characteristics. The prognostic analysis of the three major m5C modification subtypes showed that Cluster-2 had a clear survival advantage over the others. In addition, we found that DNMT1 was highly expressed in tumour tissues compared with normal tissues in a tissue microarray (TMA) and that it was positively correlated with many TME-infiltrating immune cells. High expression of the m5C regulator DNMT1 was related to a poor prognosis in patients with HCC. Furthermore, we developed three distinct Immu-clusters. Importantly, mRNAs related to the transcription of growth factor β (TGF-β)/EMT pathway were significantly up-regulated in Immu-cluster 2, indicating that this cluster is considered to be the immune rejection phenotype. Immu-cluster 3 showed elevated expression of mRNAs related to immune checkpoint genes.Conclusion: Our work revealed the association between m5C modification and immune regulators in the TME. These findings also suggest that DNMT1 has great potential as a prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target for HCC.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 030006052096265
Author(s):  
Jie Han ◽  
Yihui Rong ◽  
Xudong Gao

Objective To investigate SPARC (osteonectin), cwcv and kazal like domains proteoglycan 1 ( SPOCK1) gene expression across The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cancers, both in cancer versus normal tissues and in different stages across the cancer types. Methods This integrated bioinformatics study used data from several bioinformatics databases (Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia, Genotype-Tissue Expression, TCGA, Tumor Immune Estimation Resource [TIMER]) to define the expression pattern of the SPOCK1 gene. A survival analysis was undertaken across the cancers. The search tool for retrieval of interacting genes (STRING) database was used to identify proteins that interacted with SPOCK1. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis was conducted to determine pathway enrichment. The TIMER database was used to explore the correlation between SPOCK1 and immune cell infiltration. Results This multiomic analysis showed that the SPOCK1 gene was expressed differently between normal tissues and tumours in several cancers and that it was involved in cancer progression. The overexpression of the SPOCK1 gene was associated with poor clinical outcomes. Analysis of gene expression and tumour-infiltrating immune cells showed that SPOCK1 correlated with several immune cells across cancers. Conclusions This research showed that SPOCK1 might serve as a new target for several cancer therapies in the future.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruochan Chen ◽  
Yiya Zhang

Abstract Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has high mortality rate and is a serious disease burden globally. Hence, identification and characterization of novel biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of HCC are critically important. The protein EPDR1 (ependymin related 1) is a member of piscine brain glycoproteins and is involved in cell adhesion. This is the first study to report the expression of EPDR1 and its prognostic significance, pathological role, and association with cancer immunity in HCC.Methods: The gene expression, prognostic, and clinicopathological analyses were performed based on the data obtained from multiple transcriptome databases. Protein expression of EPDR1 in HCC was verified using human protein atlas and CPTAC databases. Co-expression network analysis using the LinkedOmics database was performed to identify genes co-expressed with EPDR1 expression. Functional analysis of the co-expressed genes, including gene set enrichment analysis was performed to identify the functional role of EPDR1. The statistical analysis was conducted in R, and the relationship between EPDR1 expression and immune cell infiltration was analyzed using TIMER and CIBERSORT resources. Results: The expression of EPDR1 was found to be significantly higher in HCC tissues than in the normal tissues and is an independent prognostic factor for the overall survival of HCC patients. Further, a high level of EPDR1 was shown to be correlated with advanced stage of HCC. Functional analysis revealed that EPDR1 is associated with multiple signaling pathways as well as pathways related to cancer and apoptosis. Notably, EPDR1 expression significantly correlated with purity and the infiltration levels of B cells, CD8+ and CD4+ T cells, macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells in HCC. Further, the EPDR1 expression significantly correlated with the expression of immune signatures, such as KIR2DL4, ITGAM, GATA3, STAT6, STAT5A, BCL6, STAT3, and HAVCR2.Conclusions: Our study identified EPDR1 as a novel prognostic biomarker in HCC. The expression of EPDR1 was shown to be associated with immune cell infiltration as well as the signature molecules that potentially regulate these processes during the carcinogenesis of HCC. With better understanding of its biological function, EPDR1 could become an effective target for HCC diagnosis and treatment in the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 153303382199208
Author(s):  
Shufang Wang ◽  
Xinlong Huo

Background: Estrogen-related receptor alpha (ESRRA) was reported to play an important role in multiple biological processes of neoplastic diseases. The roles of ESRRA in endometrial cancer have not been fully investigated yet. Methods: Expression data and clinicopathological data of patients with uteri corpus endometrial carcinoma (UCEC) were obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Comprehensive bioinformatics analysis was performed, including receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis, Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis, and Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA). Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the protein expression level of ESRRA and CCK-8 assay was performed to evaluate the effect of ESRRA on the proliferation ability. Results: A total of 552 UCEC tissues and 35 normal tissues were obtained from the TCGA database. The mRNA and protein expression level of ESRRA was highly elevated in UCEC compared with normal tissues, and was closely associated with poor prognosis. ROC analysis indicated a very high diagnostic value of ESRRA for patients with UCEC. GO and GSEA functional analysis showed that ESRRA might be mainly involved in cellular metabolism processes, in turn, tumorigenesis and progression of UCEC. Knockdown of ESRRA inhibited the proliferation of UCEC cells in vitro. Further immune cell infiltration demonstrated that ESRRA enhanced the infiltration level of neutrophil cell and reduced that of T cell (CD4+ naïve), NK cell, and cancer associated fibroblast (CAF). The alteration of immune microenvironment will greatly help in developing immune checkpoint therapy for UCEC. Conclusions: Our study comprehensively analyzed the expression level, clinical value, and possible mechanisms of action of ESRRA in UCEC. These findings showed that ESRRA might be a potential diagnostic and therapeutic target.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhuomao Mo ◽  
Daiyuan Liu ◽  
Dade Rong ◽  
Shijun Zhang

Background: Generally, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) exists in an immunosuppressive microenvironment that promotes tumor evasion. Hypoxia can impact intercellular crosstalk in the tumor microenvironment. This study aimed to explore and elucidate the underlying relationship between hypoxia and immunotherapy in patients with HCC.Methods: HCC genomic and clinicopathological datasets were obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA-LIHC), Gene Expression Omnibus databases (GSE14520) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC-LIRI). The TCGA-LIHC cases were divided into clusters based on single sample gene set enrichment analysis and hierarchical clustering. After identifying patients with immunosuppressive microenvironment with different hypoxic conditions, correlations between immunological characteristics and hypoxia clusters were investigated. Subsequently, a hypoxia-associated score was established by differential expression, univariable Cox regression, and lasso regression analyses. The score was verified by survival and receiver operating characteristic curve analyses. The GSE14520 cohort was used to validate the findings of immune cell infiltration and immune checkpoints expression, while the ICGC-LIRI cohort was employed to verify the hypoxia-associated score.Results: We identified hypoxic patients with immunosuppressive HCC. This cluster exhibited higher immune cell infiltration and immune checkpoint expression in the TCGA cohort, while similar significant differences were observed in the GEO cohort. The hypoxia-associated score was composed of five genes (ephrin A3, dihydropyrimidinase like 4, solute carrier family 2 member 5, stanniocalcin 2, and lysyl oxidase). In both two cohorts, survival analysis revealed significant differences between the high-risk and low-risk groups. In addition, compared to other clinical parameters, the established score had the highest predictive performance at both 3 and 5 years in two cohorts.Conclusion: This study provides further evidence of the link between hypoxic signals in patients and immunosuppression in HCC. Defining hypoxia-associated HCC subtypes may help reveal potential regulatory mechanisms between hypoxia and the immunosuppressive microenvironment, and our hypoxia-associated score could exhibit potential implications for future predictive models.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Honglan Guo ◽  
Qinqiao Fan

Background. We aimed to investigate the expression of the hyaluronan-mediated motility receptor (HMMR) gene in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and nonneoplastic tissues and to investigate the diagnostic and prognostic value of HMMR. Method. With the reuse of the publicly available The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data, 374 HCC patients and 50 nonneoplastic tissues were used to investigate the diagnostic and prognostic values of HMMR genes by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis and survival analysis. All patients were divided into low- and high-expression groups based on the median value of HMMR expression level. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis were used to identify prognostic factors. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was performed to explore the potential mechanism of the HMMR genes involved in HCC. The diagnostic and prognostic values were further validated in an external cohort from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC). Results. HMMR mRNA expression was significantly elevated in HCC tissues compared with that in normal tissues from both TCGA and the ICGC cohorts (all P values <0.001). Increased HMMR expression was significantly associated with histologic grade, pathological stage, and survival status (all P values <0.05). The area under the ROC curve for HMMR expression in HCC and normal tissues was 0.969 (95% CI: 0.948–0.983) in the TCGA cohort and 0.956 (95% CI: 0.932–0.973) in the ICGC cohort. Patients with high HMMR expression had a poor prognosis than patients with low expression group in both cohorts (all P < 0.001 ). Univariate and multivariate analysis also showed that HMMR is an independent predictor factor associated with overall survival in both cohorts (all P values <0.001). GSEA showed that genes upregulated in the high-HMMR HCC subgroup were mainly significantly enriched in the cell cycle pathway, pathways in cancer, and P53 signaling pathway. Conclusion. HMMR is expressed at high levels in HCC. HMMR overexpression may be an unfavorable prognostic factor for HCC.


BMC Cancer ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaokun Wang ◽  
Li Pang ◽  
Zuolong Liu ◽  
Xiangwei Meng

Abstract Background The change of immune cell infiltration essentially influences the process of colorectal cancer development. The infiltration of immune cells can be regulated by a variety of genes. Thus, modeling the immune microenvironment of colorectal cancer by analyzing the genes involved can be more conducive to the in-depth understanding of carcinogenesis and the progression thereof. Methods In this study, the number of stromal and immune cells in malignant tumor tissues were first estimated by using expression data (ESTIMATE) and cell-type identification with relative subsets of known RNA transcripts (CIBERSORT) to calculate the proportion of infiltrating immune cell and stromal components of colon cancer samples from the Cancer Genome Atlas database. Then the relationship between the TMN Classification and prognosis of malignant tumors was evaluated. Results By investigating differentially expressed genes using COX regression and protein-protein interaction network (PPI), the candidate hub gene serine protease inhibitor family E member 1 (SERPINE1) was found to be associated with immune cell infiltration. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) further projected the potential pathways with elevated SERPINE1 expression to carcinogenesis and immunity. CIBERSORT was subsequently utilized to investigate the relationship between the expression differences of SERPINE1 and immune cell infiltration and to identify eight immune cells associated with SERPINE1 expression. Conclusion We found that SERPINE1 plays a role in the remodeling of the colon cancer microenvironment and the infiltration of immune cells.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Peiyuan Li ◽  
◽  
Gangjie Qiao ◽  
Jian Lu ◽  
Wenbin Ji ◽  
...  

<abstract> <p>Plasmacytoma variant translocation 1 (PVT1) is involved in multiple signaling pathways and plays an important regulatory role in a variety of malignant tumors. However, its role in the prognosis and immune invasion of bladder urothelial carcinoma (BLCA) remains unclear. This study investigated the expression of PVT1 in tumor tissue and its relationship with immune invasion, and determined its prognostic role in patients with BLCA. Patients were identified from the cancer genome atlas (TCGA). The enrichment pathway and function of PVT1 were explained by gene ontology (GO) term analysis, gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) and single-sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA), and the degree of immune cell infiltration was quantified. Kaplan–Meier analysis and Cox regression were used to analyze the correlation between PVT1 and survival rate. PVT1-high BLCA patients had a lower 10-year disease-specific survival (DSS P &lt; 0.05) and overall survival (OS P &lt; 0.05). Multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that PVT1 (high vs. low) (P = 0.004) was an independent prognostic factor. A nomogram was used to predict the effect of PVT1 on the prognosis. PVT1 plays an important role in the progression and prognosis of BLCA and can be used as a medium biomarker to predict survival after cystectomy.</p> </abstract>


2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Yuanyuan Feng ◽  
Xinfang Tang ◽  
Changcheng Li ◽  
Ying Su ◽  
Xiaoyu Wang ◽  
...  

Objective. ARID1A has been discovered as a potential cancer biomarker. But its role in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is subject to considerable dispute. Methods. The relationship between ARID1A and clinical factors was investigated. Clinicopathological variables related to overall survival in HCC subjects were identified using Cox and Kaplan–Meier studies. The connection between immune infiltrating cells and ARID1A expression was investigated using the tumor Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset for gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA). Finally, a cell experiment was used to confirm it. Results. The gender and cancer topography (T) categorization of HCC were linked to increased ARID1A expression. Participants with advanced levels of ARID1A expression had a worse prognosis than someone with lower levels. ARID1A was shown to be a risk indicator of overall survival on its own. ARID1A expression is inversely proportional to immune cell infiltration. In vitro, decreasing ARID1A expression substantially slowed the cell cycle and decreased HCC cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. Conclusion. The expression of ARID1A could be used to predict the outcome of HCC. It is closely related to tumor immune cell infiltration.


2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Bin-Bin Da ◽  
Shuai Luo ◽  
Ming Huang ◽  
Fei Song ◽  
Rong Ding ◽  
...  

It has been demonstrated that the inflammatory response influences cancer development and can be used as a prognostic biomarker in various tumors. However, the relevance of genes associated with inflammatory responses in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains unknown. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database was analyzed using weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA) and differential analysis to discover essential inflammatory response-related genes (IFRGs). Cox regression studies, both univariate and multivariate, were employed to develop a prognostic IFRGs signature. Additionally, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) was used to deduce the biological function of the IFRGs signature. Finally, we estimated immune cell infiltration using a single sample GSEA (ssGSEA) and x-cell. Our results revealed that, among the major HCC IFRGs, two (DNASE1L3 and KLKB1) were employed to create a predictive IFRG signature. The IFRG signature could correctly predict overall survival (O.S) as per Kaplan-Meier time-dependent roc curves analysis. It was also linked to pathological tumor stage and T stage and might be used as a prognostic predictor in HCC. GSEA analysis concluded that the IFRG signature might influence the immune response in HCC. Immunological cell infiltration and immune checkpoint molecule expression differed in the high-risk and low-risk groups. As a result of our findings, DNASILE may play a role in the tumor microenvironment. However, more research is necessary to confirm the role of DNASE1L3 and KLKB1.


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