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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 9|pp 12565—12586

Investigation and verification of the clinical significance and perspective of natural killer group 2 member D ligands in colon adenocarcinoma

Guo-Tian Ruan1, Shuai Wang1, Li-Chen Zhu2, Xi-Wen Liao3, Xiang-Kun Wang3, Cun Liao1, Ling Yan4, Hai-Lun Xie1, Yi-Zhen Gong5, Jia-Liang Gan1, Feng Gao1
  • 1Department of Colorectal and Anal Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China
  • 2Department of Immunology, School of Preclinical Medicine, Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China
  • 3Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China
  • 4Department of Thoracic Surgery, Affiliated Hospital of Guilin Medical College, Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China
  • 5Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, Affiliated Hospital of Guilin Medical College, Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China
* Equal contribution
# Co-first authors
Received: November 13, 2020Accepted: January 14, 2021Published: April 27, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202935

Copyright: © 2021 Ruan 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

This study investigated and verified the diagnostic and prognostic values of natural killer group 2 member D ligand (NKG2DL) genes in colon adenocarcinoma (COAD). We downloaded NKG2DLs expression data and corresponding clinical parameters from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and used bioinformatics techniques to investigate the values of NKG2DLs in COAD. Then, we used the GSE40967 cohort to verify the prognostic value of NKG2DLs. Finally, we verified the ULBP2 expression level in tissues, and also investigated the diagnostic and prognostic values of ULBP2 in COAD. The diagnostic receiver operating characteristic curves showed that ULBP1, ULBP2, ULBP3, and RAET1L had high diagnostic values in COAD [Area Under Curve (AUC) > 0.9]. In TCGA cohort, the univariate and multivariate survival analyses suggested that ULBP2 was correlated with the prognosis of COAD recurrence-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS). In GSE40967 cohort, ULBP2 was associated with CC RFS and OS. Reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction and immunohistochemistry results showed that ULBP2 was highly expressed in COAD tumor tissues (P < 0.05) and both had diagnostic values (AUC > 0.7). Validated survival analysis showed that the high expression of ULBP2 had a worse prognosis in COAD OS and RFS. Thus, ULBP2 might be an independent diagnostic and prognostic biomarker of COAD.