Long non-coding RNA expression profiling reveals LINC00271 as a prognostic marker in adrenocortical carcinoma
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ABSTRACT: Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is an aggressive malignancy with a low but variable overall survival rate. Even after complete tumor resection, over half of patients develop recurrent disease. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been found to be involved in cancer initiation/progression and as markers of cancer prognosis. The role of lncRNAs in ACC is poorly understood. Thus, in this study we performed lncRNA expression profiling in ACC, adrenocortical adenoma (ACA) and normal adrenal cortex (NAC). Total RNA was extracted from fresh frozen tissue samples (11 ACA, nine ACC and five NAC samples) with histopathological confirmed diagnosis. ArrayStar Human LncRNA/mRNA Expression Microarray V3.0 was used for transcriptome analysis. Differentially expressed lncRNAs were validated using TaqMan real-time quantitative PCR in a validation cohort including an additional 10 ACCs. The ACC dataset from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project was used to evaluate the prognostic utility of lncRNAs found to be differentially expressed in ACC. Survival curves were plotted by Kaplan-Meier analysis, and differences in survival rates were assessed using a log-rank test. P < 0.05 was considered significant. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) was performed to identify lncRNA-associated biological signaling pathways. Unsupervised hierarchical and heat map clustering showed distinct clustering of ACC samples compared with NAC and ACA samples by lncRNA expression profiles. A total of 874 lncRNAs were differentially expressed between ACC and NAC, including known carcinogenesis-related lncRNAs such as HOTTIP, HOXA11-AS1, CRNDE, LINC00271 and TBXAS1. One thousand seventy-six lncRNAs were differentially expressed between ACC and ACA. LINC00271 was a prognostic marker, with patients with low LINC00271 expression surviving significantly shorter than patients with a high LINC00271 expression. Median survival time (MST) for the low-expression group was 1788 days, whereas the MST was not reached for the high-expression group (P < 0.019). Importantly, low LINC00271 expression was positively associated with WNT signaling, cell cycle, chromosome segregation and tissue morphogenesis pathways. ACC has a distinct lncRNA expression profile. LINC00271 is a prognostic marker in ACC and is involved in biological pathways commonly dysregulated in ACC.
ORGANISM(S): Homo sapiens
PROVIDER: GSE124531 | GEO | 2019/07/01
REPOSITORIES: GEO
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