Overexpression of CENPL mRNA potentially regulated by miR-340-3p predicts the prognosis of pancreatic cancer patients.

BACKGROUND: In our previous study it was found that CENPL was overexpressed in hepatocellular carcinoma and significantly predicted patient's prognosis. However, the expression and prognostic value of CENPL in other gastrointestinal tumors remain unknown. Therefore, we investigated the expression and prognostic value of CENPL in esophageal carcinoma (ESCA), stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD), pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PAAD), colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) and rectum adenocarcinoma (READ). METHODS: In this study, Oncomine, GEPIA, OncoLnc, TIMER, cBioPortal, miRWalk and ENCORI databases were used to analyze the level of CENPL mRNA, prognostic value and potential regulatory mechanism of CENPL mRNA in tumors. The CENPL expression and clinicopathological data regarding PAAD were from the UCSC Xena database and univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were performed using R (Version 3.6.3). Immunohistochemical staining was used to verify the expression of CENPL protein in clinical specimens. Cytoscape (Version: 3.7.2) was used to visualize microRNA (miRNA) that potentially regulates CENPL. RESULTS: Gene differential expression analysis showed that CENPL mRNA was significantly overexpressed in ESCA, STAD, PAAD, COAD and READ (p < 0.01). The overexpression of CENPL mRNA was significantly correlated with the poor prognosis of PAAD patients (p < 0.05). However, there was no significant correlation between the level of CENPL mRNA and the prognosis of ESCA, STAD, COAD and READ patients (p > 0.05). Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses suggested that CENPL was a prognostic risk factor for PAAD. The mutation rate of CENPL in PAAD was 2.2% (17/850). There was no significant correlation between the CENPL expression and the infiltration levels of immune cells in PAAD (|Cor|< 0.5). Immunohistochemical staining showed that CENPL was overexpressed in 42% (11/26) of PAAD specimens, which was significantly higher compared with that in the normal tissues. The expression of miR-340-3p and miR-484 in PAAD were significantly lower than in the normal tissues (p < 0.05) and PAAD patients with lower expression of miR-340-3p had poorer prognosis (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: CENPL potentially regulated by miR-340-3p, is overexpressed in PAAD and predicts patient's prognosis, suggestive of a diagnostic and prognostic value in PAAD patients.

Communication mode preference paradox among native Chinese speakers.

Previous researchers have detected a phenomenon called communication mode preference (CMP) paradox (i.e., preferring to receive information about the probabilities of chance events numerically but convey such information verbally) among native English speakers (I. Erev & B. L. Cohen, 1990; T. S. Wallsten, D. V. Budescu, R. Zwick, & S. M. Kemp, 1993). Given the increasing evidence of systematic cross-cultural differences in judgment and decision making involving probabilities, the purpose of the present study was to explore whether the CMP paradox is robust enough to survive in the Chinese-speaking culture in which nonprobabilistic thinking appears to occur more frequently. The authors asked 370 native Chinese speakers about their preferences for verbal and numerical probability communications in both a general and weather-forecasting context. The results show that the CMP paradox phenomenon occurs in the Chinese culture and appears to be even more pronounced than in American English cultural settings.