Differentially expressed LncRNAs as potential prognostic biomarkers for glioblastoma.

ABSTRACT

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and aggressive brain tumor with the poor clinical outcome. LncRNAs (Long non-coding RNAs) play an important role in the occurrence and development of glioblastoma. We aimed to explore the role that lncRNAs play in regulating glioblastoma and the pathways they are enriched in. The expression data of a total of 516 GBM samples were downloaded from TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas). We identified the differentially expressed lncRNAs between cancer and normal tissues and performed annotation of differentially expressed lncRNAs to figure out the functions and pathways they were enriched in. Finally, cluster analysis was performed on the expression data of lncRNA and the samples were divided into four kinds, which were then used in the survival analysis. A total of 90 down-regulated lncRNAs and 224 up-regulated lncRNAs were screened out, which were mostly enriched in pathways of Alzhermer's disease and apoptosis. Their neighborhood genes were mostly enriched in genes sets of RTN1 and MAPK10.The characterization of differentially expressed lncRNAs was found out and the mostly enriched pathways were obtained to figure out the regulation mechanism of lncRNA. Our findings may provide evidence of the potential role of lncRNA in the diagnosis, prognosis and target therapy of GBM.