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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 10|pp 13663—13679

The lncRNA GATA3-AS1/miR-495-3p/CENPU axis predicts poor prognosis of breast cancer via the PLK1 signaling pathway

Shuangyan Lin1, Mingyuan Zhao1, Yanbo Lv1, Genxiang Mao2, Shiping Ding3, Fang Peng1
  • 1Department of Pathology, Zhejiang Hospital, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
  • 2Department of Geriatrics, Zhejiang Provincial Key Lab of Geriatrics, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
  • 3Department of Cell Biology, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
Received: August 5, 2020Accepted: March 22, 2021Published: April 26, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202909

Copyright: © 2021 Lin 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

The function of centromere protein U (CENPU) gene in breast cancer has not been well understood. Therefore, we explored the expression profiles of CENPU gene in breast carcinoma to better understand the functions of this gene, as well as the relationship between CENPU expression and the prognosis of breast carcinoma patients. Our results indicate that CENPU was expressed at significantly higher levels in cancerous tissues than in normal tissues. Furthermore, CENPU expression correlated significantly with many clinicopathological characteristics of breast cancer. In addition, we discovered that high levels of CENPU expression predicted poor prognosis in patients with breast cancer. Functional investigation revealed that 180 genes exhibited co-expression with CENPU. Functional annotation indicated that 17 of these genes were involved in the PLK1 signaling pathway, with most of them (16/17) being expressed at significantly higher levels in malignant tissues compared with normal controls and correlating with a poor prognosis. Subsequently, we found that four miRNAs, namely hsa-miR-543, hsa-miR-495-3p, hsa-miR-485-3p, and hsa-miR-337-3p, could be regarded as potential CENPU expression regulators. Then, five lncRNAs were predicted to potentially bind to the four miRNAs. Combination of the results from expression, survival, correlation analysis and functional experiments analysis demonstrated the link between lncRNA GATA3-AS1/miR-495-3p/CENPU axis and prognosis of breast cancer. In conclusion, CENPU could be involved in cell cycle progression through PLK1 signaling pathway.