Analysis of significance of collagen triple helix repeat containing 1 gene expression in colon adenocarcinoma based on bioinformatics / 肿瘤研究与临床

ABSTRACT

Objective:To investigate the significance of collagen triple helix repeat containing 1 (CTHRC1) gene expression in colon adenocarcinoma based on bioinformatics.Methods:The GEPIA2 analysis tool was used to analyze the expression of CTHRC1 gene in colon adenocarcinoma and the relationship between its expression and the survival prognosis of patients in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and GTEx database. ULACAN analysis tool was used to analyze the methylation level of CTHRC1 gene in colon adenocarcinoma tissues and normal colon tissues in TCGA database. The cBioportal network analysis tool was used to analyze the mutation of CTHRC1 gene. TIMER analysis tool was used to analyze the relationship between CTHRC1 expression and immune cells infiltration, tumor-associated fibroblasts infiltration and functional immune cells. STRING database was used to analyze the proteins interacted with CTHRC1, and the enrichment analyses were performed.Results:The expressions of CTHRC1 gene and protein in colon adenocarcinoma tumor tissues were higher than those in normal colon tissues, and the differences were statistically significant (both P < 0.05), and CTHRC1 gene showed high methylation level in normal colon tissues and low methylation level in tumor tissues ( P < 0.05). A total of 19 mutations were detected in 2 480 colorectal adenocarcinoma and colon adenocarcinoma samples. Among them, 3 cases of colon adenocarcinoma specimens had CTHRC1 mutations, the mutation sites were R235H, A124V and R193C, and the mutation types were all missense mutations. CTHRC1 gene expression was positively correlated with infiltrations of CD8 + T cells, CD4 + T cells, macrophages, neutrophils, dendritic cells and tumor-associated fibroblasts (all P < 0.01). The overall survival and disease-free survival of patients with high expression of CTHRC1 gene were worse than those of patients with low expression of CTHRC1 gene (all P < 0.05). Conclusions:The methylation of CTHRC1 gene and the infiltration of tumor-associated immune cells may have important significances in the pathogenesis of colon adenocarcinoma. CTHRC1 gene expression and immune cells infiltration can be used as predictors of the survival prognosis of colon adenocarcinoma patients.