scholarly journals Screening of miRNAs as Prognostic Biomarkers for Colon Adenocarcinoma and Biological Function Analysis of Their Target Genes

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guoliang Zheng ◽  
GuoJun Zhang ◽  
Yan Zhao ◽  
Zhichao Zheng

We constructed a prognostic risk model for colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) using microRNAs (miRNAs) as biomarkers. Clinical data of patients with COADs and miRNA-seq data were from TCGA, and the differential expression of miRNAs (carcinoma vs. para-carcinoma tissues) was assessed using R software. COAD data were randomly divided into Training and Testing Sets. A linear prognostic risk model was constructed using Cox regression analysis based on the Training Set. Patients were classified as high-risk or low-risk according to the score of the prognostic model. Survival analysis and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to evaluate model performance. The gene targets in the prognostic model were identified and their biological functions were analyzed. Analysis of COAD and normal cell lines using qPCR was used to verify the model. There were 134 up-regulated and 140 down-regulated miRNAs. We used the Training Set to develop a prognostic model based on the expression of seven miRNAs. ROC analysis indicated this model had acceptable prediction accuracy (area under the curve=0.784). Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that overall survival was worse in the high-risk group. Cox regression analysis showed that the 7-miRNA Risk Score was an independent prognostic factor. The 2,863 predicted target genes were mainly enriched in the MAPK, PI3K-AKT, proteoglycans in cancer, and mTOR signaling pathways. For unknown reasons, expression of these miRNAs in cancerous and normal cells differed somewhat from model predictions. Regardless, the 7-miRNA Risk Score can be used to predict COAD prognosis and may help to guide clinical treatment.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin-Yu Li ◽  
Lei Hou ◽  
Lu-yu Zhang ◽  
Xue-yuan Li ◽  
xi-tao Yang

Abstract Aim: A glioblastoma (GBM) prognostic model was developed with GBM -related alternative splicing (AS) data and prognostic markers were identified. Methods: AS data and clinical data of GBM patients were retrieved from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) SpliceSeq database and TCGA database, respectively. The data from these two databases were intersected to screen the prognosis-associated AS events, which was subsequently examined in Univariate Cox regression models. To avoid model overfitting, LASSO regression analysis was conducted. On the basis of these AS events, we established a prognostic model of GBM with the use of multivariate Cox regression analysis. On the strength of this model, the patients were assigned into high-risk and low-risk groups with a median risk score as the threshold. Kaplan-Meier survival, receiver operating characteristic (ROC), and calibration curves were applied to evaluate the performance of this model. Finally, combined with the risk model and clinicopathological characteristics, Cox regression analysis was utilized to identify the independent prognostic markers of GBM, and a nomogram was constructed. Results: The AS and clinical data of 169 GBM patients from the TCGA SpliceSeq and TCGA databases were collected. Univariate Cox regression analysis identified 1000 prognosis-related AS events in GBM, and then Lasso regression analysis identified 16 AS events. A GBM prognostic risk model was constructed based on AS events of 7 genes (FAM86B1, ZNF302, C19orf57, RPL39L, CBLL1, RWDD1, IGF2BP2). Through this model, we found lower overall survival (OS) rates of the high-risk population versus the low-risk population (p < 0.05). ROC and calibration curve analyses demonstrated the good ability of this model to predict the OS of GBM patients. Cox regression analysis suggested risk score as an independent prognostic factor for GBM. We also found that IGF2BP2 is associated with patient prognosis and have a strong relationship with immunotherapy response. Conclusion: The prognostic model based on AS events can significantly distinguish the survival rate of high-risk and low-risk GBM patients and IGF2BP2 were identified as a novel prognostic biomarker and immunotherapeutic target.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Feng ◽  
Jian Li ◽  
Weiling Xuan ◽  
Hanbo Liu ◽  
Dexin Cheng ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a prevalent primary liver cancer and the main cause of cancer mortality. Its high complexity and dismal prognosis bring dramatic difficulty to treatment. Due to the disclosed dual functions of autophagy in cancer development, understanding autophagy-related genes devotes into seeking novel biomarkers for HCC. Methods Differential expression of genes in normal and tumor groups was analyzed to acquire autophagy-related genes in HCC. GO and KEGG pathway analyses were conducted on these genes. Genes were then screened by univariate regression analysis. The screened genes were subjected to multivariate Cox regression analysis to build a prognostic model. The model was validated by ICGC validation set. Results Altogether, 42 autophagy-related differential genes were screened by differential expression analysis. Enrichment analysis showed that they were mainly enriched in pathways including regulation of autophagy and cell apoptosis. Genes were screened by univariate analysis and multivariate Cox regression analysis to build a prognostic model. The model was constituted by 6 feature genes: EIF2S1, BIRC5, SQSTM1, ATG7, HDAC1, FKBP1A. Validation confirmed the accuracy and independence of this model in predicting HCC patient’s prognosis. Conclusion A total of 6 feature genes were identified to build a prognostic risk model. This model is conducive to investigating interplay between autophagy-related genes and HCC prognosis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fei Li ◽  
Dongcen Ge ◽  
Shu-lan Sun

Abstract Background Ferroptosis is a newly discovered form of cell death characterized by iron-dependent lipid peroxidation. This study aims to investigate the potential correlation between ferroptosis and the prognosis of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). Methods RNA-seq data were collected from the LUAD dataset of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Based on ferroptosis-related genes, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between LUAD and paracancerous specimens were identified. The univariate Cox regression analysis was performed to screen key genes associated with the prognosis of LUAD. LUAD patients were divided into the training set and validation set. Then, we screened out key genes and built a prognostic prediction model involving 5 genes using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression with tenfold cross-validation and the multivariate Cox regression analysis. After dividing LUAD patients based on the median level of risk score as cut-off value, the generated prognostic prediction model was validated in the validation set. Moreover, we analyzed the somatic mutations, and estimated the scores of immune infiltration in the high-risk and low-risk groups. Functional enrichment analysis of DEGs was performed as well. Results High-risk scores indicated the worse prognosis of LUAD. The maximum area under curve (AUC) of the training set and the validation set in this study was 0.7 and 0.69, respectively. Moreover, we integrated the age, gender, and tumor stage to construct the composite nomogram. The charts indicated that the AUC of LUAD cases with the survival time of 1, 3 and 5 years was 0.698, 0.71 and 0.73, respectively. In addition, the mutation frequency of LUAD patients in the high-risk group was significantly higher than that in the low-risk group. Simultaneously, DEGs were mainly enriched in ferroptosis-related pathways by analyzing the functional results. Conclusions This study constructs a novel LUAD prognosis prediction model involving 5 ferroptosis-related genes, which can be used as a promising tool for decision-making of clinical therapeutic strategies of LUAD.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuying Tan ◽  
Liqing Lu ◽  
Xujun Liang ◽  
Yongheng Chen

Abstract Background: Colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) is one of the most common malignant tumors and diagnosed at an advanced stage with poor prognosis in the world. Pyroptosis is involved in the initiation and progression of tumors. This research focused on constructing a pyroptosis-related ceRNA network to generate a reliable risk model for risk prediction and immune infiltration analysis of COAD.Methods: Transcriptome data, miRNA-sequencing data and clinical information were downloaded from the TCGA database. Firstly, differentially expressed mRNAs (DEmRNAs), miRNAs (DEmiRNAs), and lncRNAs (DElncRNAs) were identified to construct a pyroptosis-related ceRNA network. Secondly, a pyroptosis-related lncRNA risk model was developed applying univariate Cox regression analysis and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator method (LASSO) regression analysis. The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analyses were utilized to functionally annotate RNAs contained in the ceRNA network. In addition, Kaplan-Meier analysis, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, univariate and multivariate Cox regression, and nomogram were applied to validate this risk model. Finally, the relationship of this risk model with immune cells and immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) related genes were analyzed.Results: Totally 5373 DEmRNAs, 1159 DElncRNAs and 355 DEmiRNAs were identified. A pyroptosis-related ceRNA regulatory network containing 132 lncRNAs, 7miRNAs and 5 mRNAs was constructed and a ceRNA-based pyroptosis-related risk model including 11 lncRNAs was built. Tumor tissues were classified into high- and low- risk groups according to the median risk score. Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that the high-risk group had a shorter survival time; ROC analysis, independent prognostic analysis and nomogram further indicated the risk model was a significant independent prognostic factor which had excellent ability to predict patients’ risk. Moreover, immune infiltration analysis indicated that the risk model was related to immune infiltration cells (i.e., B cells naïve, T cells follicular helper, Macrophages M1, etc.) and ICB-related genes (i.e., PD-1, CTLA4, HAVCR2, etc).Conclusions: This pyroptosis-related lncRNA risk model possessed good prognostic value and the ability to predict the outcome of ICB immunotherapy in COAD.


Author(s):  
Dawei Zhou ◽  
Junchen Wan ◽  
Jiang Luo ◽  
Yuhao Tao

Background: Liver cancer is one of the most common diseases in the world. At present, the mechanism of autophagy genes in liver cancer is not very clear. Therefore, it is meaningful to study the role and prognostic value of autophagy genes in liver cancer. Objective: The purpose of this study is to conduct a bioinformatics analysis of autophagy genes related to primary liver cancer to establish a prognostic model of primary liver cancer based on autophagy genes. Results: Through difference analysis, 31 differential autophagy genes were screened out and then analyzed by GO and KEGG analysis. At the same time, we built a PPI network. To optimize the evaluation of the prognosis of liver cancer patients, we integrated multiple autophagy genes to establish a prognostic model. By using univariate cox regression analysis, 15 autophagy genes related to prognosis were screened out. Then we included these 15 genes into the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO), and performed multi-factor cox regression analysis on the 9 selected genes to construct a prognostic model. The risk score of each patient was calculated based on 4 genes(BIRC5, HSP8, SQSTM1, and TMEM74) which participated in the establishing of the model, then the patients were divided into high-risk groups and low-risk groups. In the multivariate cox regression analysis, the risk score was the independent prognostic factors (HR=1.872, 95%CI=1.544-2.196, P<0.001). Survival analysis showed that the survival time of the low-risk group was significantly longer than that of the high-risk group. Combining clinical characteristics and autophagy genes, we constructed a nomogram for predicting prognosis. The external dataset GSE14520 proved that the nomogram has a good prediction for individual patients with primary liver cancer. Conclusion: This study provided potential autophagy-related markers for liver cancer patients to predict their prognosis and revealed part of the molecular mechanism of liver cancer autophagy. At the same time, the certain gene pathways and protein pathways related to autophagy may provide some inspiration for the development of anticancer drugs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Wang ◽  
Weiwei Wen ◽  
Hongfei Liu ◽  
Jun Zhang ◽  
Xiaofeng Zhang ◽  
...  

Background: Stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD) is a significant global health problem. It is urgent to identify reliable predictors and establish a potential prognostic model.Methods: RNA-sequencing expression data of patients with STAD were downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Gene expression profiling and survival analysis were performed to investigate differentially expressed genes (DEGs) with significant clinical prognosis value. Overall survival (OS) analysis and univariable and multivariable Cox regression analyses were performed to establish the prognostic model. Protein–protein interaction (PPI) network, functional enrichment analysis, and differential expression investigation were also performed to further explore the potential mechanism of the prognostic genes in STAD. Finally, nomogram establishment was undertaken by performing multivariate Cox regression analysis, and calibration plots were generated to validate the nomogram.Results: A total of 229 overlapping DEGs were identified. Following Kaplan–Meier survival analysis and univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis, 11 genes significantly associated with prognosis were screened and five of these genes, including COL10A1, MFAP2, CTHRC1, P4HA3, and FAP, were used to establish the risk model. The results showed that patients with high-risk scores have a poor prognosis, compared with those with low-risk scores (p = 0.0025 for the training dataset and p = 0.045 for the validation dataset). Subsequently, a nomogram (including TNM stage, age, gender, histologic grade, and risk score) was created. In addition, differential expression and immunohistochemistry stain of the five core genes in STAD and normal tissues were verified.Conclusion: We develop a prognostic-related model based on five core genes, which may serve as an independent risk factor for survival prediction in patients with STAD.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao Han ◽  
Zhifan Zuo ◽  
Meilin Qu ◽  
Yinghui Zhou ◽  
Qing Li ◽  
...  

Background: Although low-grade glioma (LGG) has a good prognosis, it is prone to malignant transformation into high-grade glioma. It has been confirmed that the characteristics of inflammatory factors and immune microenvironment are closely related to the occurrence and development of tumors. It is necessary to clarify the role of inflammatory genes and immune infiltration in LGG.Methods: We downloaded the transcriptome gene expression data and corresponding clinical data of LGG patients from the TCGA and GTEX databases to screen prognosis-related differentially expressed inflammatory genes with the difference analysis and single-factor Cox regression analysis. The prognostic risk model was constructed by LASSO Cox regression analysis, which enables us to compare the overall survival rate of high- and low-risk groups in the model by Kaplan–Meier analysis and subsequently draw the risk curve and survival status diagram. We analyzed the accuracy of the prediction model via ROC curves and performed GSEA enrichment analysis. The ssGSEA algorithm was used to calculate the score of immune cell infiltration and the activity of immune-related pathways. The CellMiner database was used to study drug sensitivity.Results: In this study, 3 genes (CALCRL, MMP14, and SELL) were selected from 9 prognosis-related differential inflammation genes through LASSO Cox regression analysis to construct a prognostic risk model. Further analysis showed that the risk score was negatively correlated with the prognosis, and the ROC curve showed that the accuracy of the model was better. The age, grade, and risk score can be used as independent prognostic factors (p &lt; 0.001). GSEA analysis confirmed that 6 immune-related pathways were enriched in the high-risk group. We found that the degree of infiltration of 12 immune cell subpopulations and the scores of 13 immune functions and pathways in the high-risk group were significantly increased by applying the ssGSEA method (p &lt; 0.05). Finally, we explored the relationship between the genes in the model and the susceptibility of drugs.Conclusion: This study analyzed the correlation between the inflammation-related risk model and the immune microenvironment. It is expected to provide a reference for the screening of LGG prognostic markers and the evaluation of immune response.


Hereditas ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 159 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Tu ◽  
Ling Ye ◽  
Qingsong Cao ◽  
Sisi Gong ◽  
Miaohua Jiang ◽  
...  

Abstract Background MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in the prognosis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). This study used clinical data and expression data of miRNAs to develop a prognostic survival signature for NPC patients to detect high-risk subject. Results We identified 160 differentially expressed miRNAs using RNA-Seq data from the GEO database. Cox regression model consisting of hsa-miR-26a, hsa-let-7e, hsa-miR-647, hsa-miR-30e, and hsa-miR-93 was constructed by the least absolute contraction and selection operator (LASSO) in the training set. All the patients were classified into high-risk or low-risk groups by the optimal cutoff value of the 5-miRNA signature risk score, and the two risk groups demonstrated significant different survival. The 5-miRNA signature showed high predictive and prognostic accuracies. The results were further confirmed in validation and external validation set. Results from multivariate Cox regression analysis validated 5-miRNA signature as an independent prognostic factor. A total of 13 target genes were predicted to be the target genes of miRNA target genes. Both PPI analysis and KEGG analysis networks were closely related to tumor signaling pathways. The prognostic model of mRNAs constructed using data from the dataset GSE102349 had higher AUCs of the target genes and higher immune infiltration scores of the low-risk groups. The mRNA prognostic model also performed well on the independent immunotherapy dataset Imvigor210. Conclusions This study constructed a novel 5-miRNA signature for prognostic prediction of the survival of NPC patients and may be useful for individualized treatment of NPC patients.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhengxin Wu ◽  
Jinshui Tan ◽  
Yifan Zhuang ◽  
Mengya Zhong ◽  
Yubo Xiong ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Metabolic reprogramming has been reported in various kinds of cancers and is related to clinical prognosis, but the prognostic role of pyrimidine metabolism in gastric cancer (GC) remains unclear. Methods Here, we employed DEG analysis to detect the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in pyrimidine metabolic signaling pathway and used univariate Cox analysis, Lasso-penalizes Cox regression analysis, Kaplan–Meier survival analysis, univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis to explore their prognostic roles in GC. The DEGs were experimentally validated in GC cells and clinical samples by quantitative real-time PCR. Results Through DEG analysis, we found NT5E, DPYS and UPP1 these three genes are highly expressed in GC. This conclusion has also been verified in GC cells and clinical samples. A prognostic risk model was established according to these three DEGs by Univariate Cox analysis and Lasso-penalizes Cox regression analysis. Kaplan–Meier survival analysis suggested that patient cohorts with high risk score undertook a lower overall survival rate than those with low risk score. Stratified survival analysis, Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis of this model confirmed that it is a reliable and independent clinical factor. Therefore, we made nomograms to visually depict the survival rate of GC patients according to some important clinical factors including our risk model. Conclusion In a word, our research found that pyrimidine metabolism is dysregulated in GC and established a prognostic model of GC based on genes differentially expressed in pyrimidine metabolism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Rui Feng ◽  
Jian Li ◽  
Weiling Xuan ◽  
Hanbo Liu ◽  
Dexin Cheng ◽  
...  

Background. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a prevalent primary liver cancer. Treatment is dramatically difficult due to its high complexity and poor prognosis. Due to the disclosed dual functions of autophagy in cancer development, understanding autophagy-related genes devotes into novel biomarkers for HCC. Methods. Differential expression of genes in normal and tumor groups was analyzed to acquire autophagy-related genes in HCC. These genes were subjected to GO and KEGG pathway analyses. Genes were then screened by univariate regression analysis. The screened genes were subjected to multivariate Cox regression analysis to build a prognostic model. The model was validated by the ICGC validation set. Results. To sum up, 42 differential genes relevant to autophagy were screened by differential expression analysis. Enrichment analysis showed that they were mainly enriched in pathways including regulation of autophagy and cell apoptosis. Genes were screened by univariate analysis and multivariate Cox regression analysis to build a prognostic model. The model constituted 6 feature genes: EIF2S1, BIRC5, SQSTM1, ATG7, HDAC1, and FKBP1A. Validation confirmed the accuracy and independence of this model in predicting the HCC patient’s prognosis. Conclusion. A total of 6 feature genes were identified to build a prognostic risk model. This model is conducive to investigating interplay between autophagy-related genes and HCC prognosis.


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