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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 23|pp 23931—23944

Clinical and prognostic pan-cancer analysis of m6A RNA methylation regulators in four types of endocrine system tumors

Kai Li1,2,3,4, Haiqing Luo4, Hui Luo2,3, Xiao Zhu1,2,3
  • 1Guangdong Key Laboratory for Research and Development of Natural Drugs, The Marine Biomedical Research Institute, Guangdong Medical University, Zhanjiang 524023, Guangdong, China
  • 2The Marine Biomedical Research Institute of Guangdong Zhanjiang, Zhanjiang 524023, Guangdong, China
  • 3Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory Zhanjiang, Zhanjiang 524023, Guangdong, China
  • 4Cancer Center, Affiliated Hospital, Guangdong Medical University, Zhanjiang 24023, Guangdong, China
* Equal contribution
Received: July 24, 2020Accepted: August 28, 2020Published: November 20, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104064

Copyright: © 2020 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

N6-methyladenosine (m6A), internal modification of mRNA, has recently been reported to be an important regulatory mechanism affecting tumor proliferation. However, its role in endocrine system tumors is poorly understood. We obtained datasets for four types tumors from the TCGA database, analyzed the GTEx database as a supplement to the control group, and used “Perl” and “R” software to analyze the datasets. Then we differentiated the expression level, used it to cluster consensus. Besides, we established lasso regression model to screen variables, used univariate and multivariate cox analyses to explore the independent risk factors associated with cancer prognosis. The results indicated that except for WTAP, the expression level of METTL3 was negatively correlated with other genes. The expression level of WTAP and METTL16 was positively correlated with overall survival (OS). Moreover, we found that different clinical subtypes of adrenal cortical carcinoma had significant differences in survival status, histologic grading, pathological T grade, and OS. Furthermore, different clinical subtypes of thyroid carcinoma had significant differences in histologic grading and pathological T grade. The differential expression of m6A regulatory genes is closely associated with the presence of endocrine-system-related tumors, and risk scores can be used to assess prognosis.