NAA10 overexpression dictates distinct epigenetic, genetic, and clinicopathological characteristics in adult gliomas.

ABSTRACT

NAA10 is a novel biomarker of cancer progression. The oncogenic and biological mechanisms of NAA10 in human malignancies are controversial and remain to be elucidated. Herein, we investigated the biological and clinicopathological implications of NAA10 gene expression in adult gliomas. We collected data from The Human Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, including patients from TCGA-GBM and TCGA-LGG projects. In total, there were 666 patients from the 2 projects (513 and 153 from TCGA-LGG and TCGA-GBM, respectively). Different analyses (pathway, DNA methylation, and survival analyses) require further specific case eliminations. Based on NAA10 expression, we divided 666 tumors into 2 subgroups NAA10-high and NAA10-low glioma. There were higher activities of cell proliferation, metabolic reprogramming, DNA repair, angiogenesis, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, TNF-α, IL6/JAK/STAT6, mTORC1 signaling, and MYC targets in NAA10-high glioma, while P53, TGF-ß, Wnt, and Hedgehog pathways were highly expressed by NAA10-low gliomas. t-distributed stochastic neighbors embedding dimension reduction of DNA methylation also showed a high distribution of NAA10-high gliomas in distinct clusters. Survival analyses showed that high NAA10 expression was an independent prognostic factor. NAA10 expression dictated epigenetic, genetic, and clinicopathological differences in adult glioma. Further studies are required to investigate the detailed NAA10 oncogenic mechanisms and to validate NAA10 immunohistochemistry.