Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 4 pp 5892—5905
Circ_ 0115744 acts as miR-144 sponge to promote and predict the metastasis of colorectal cancer
- 1 Department of General Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou 215004, China
- 2 Department of General Surgery, The Affiliated Suqian Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University, Suqian 223800, China
- 3 Department of General Surgery, Gaochun People Hospital, Gaochun 210000, China
Received: August 22, 2020 Accepted: October 29, 2020 Published: February 11, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202513How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Ma 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
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common human malignant tumors in recent years. Although multiple approaches have been developed for the diagnosis and therapy of CRC, the overall survival rates of patients with metastatic and recurrent CRC remain poor. In the present study, we used the high-throughput microarray technology to screen circular RNAs (circRNAs) as a potential fingerprint for CRC. We mainly aimed to screen potential biomarkers for liver metastasis by performing risk score analysis. We detected the upregulated expression of circ_0115744 in patients with CRC with liver metastasis (CRLM). Further investigation using a validation set indicated that circ_0115744 might be considered as a fingerprint for CRLM. Functionally, the overexpression of circ_0115744 significantly promoted the invasion of CRC cell lines, while decreased expression of circ_0115744 suppressed cell invasion in vitro. Mechanistic analysis showed that circ_0115744 acted as a competing endogenous RNA of miR-144 to diminish the repressive effect of miR-144 on its target EZH2. In conclusion, we found that increased expression of circ_0115744 could differentiate CRLM from CRC and that the newly identified circ_0115744/miR-144/EZH2 axis was involved in the progression of CRC, which might be used as a potential diagnostic and therapeutic target for patients with CRC.