Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 19 pp 22802—22829
Highly expressed centromere protein L indicates adverse survival and associates with immune infiltration in hepatocellular carcinoma
- 1 The First School of Clinical Medicine, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510405, PR China
- 2 Department of Oncology, Lingnan Medical Research Center of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510405, PR China
- 3 Department of Medical Technologic, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, Guangdong 518000, PR China
- 4 Department of Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, Guangdong 518000, PR China
- 5 Department of Oncology, Shenzhen Hospital of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Shenzhen 518000, Guangdong, PR China
- 6 Foshan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Foshan 528000, Guangdong, PR China
- 7 Department of Psychiatry, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangdong 510150, PR China
Received: May 10, 2021 Accepted: September 11, 2021 Published: October 4, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203574How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Zeng 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
Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is characterized by rapid progression, high recurrence rate and poor prognosis. Early prediction for the prognosis and immunotherapy efficacy is of great significance to improve the survival of HCC patients. However, there is still no reliable predictor at present. This study is aimed to explore the role of centromere protein L (CENPL) in predicting prognosis and its association with immune infiltration in HCC.
Methods: The expression of CENPL was identified through analyzing the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) data. The association between CENPL expression and clinicopathological features was investigated by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test or Kruskal Wallis test and logistic regression. The role of CENPL in prognosis was examined via Kaplan-Meier method and Log-rank test as well as univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis. Besides, in TIMER and GEPIA database, we investigated the correlation between CENPL level and immunocyte and immunocyte markers, and the prognostic-related methylation sites in CENPL were identified by MethSurv.
Results: CENPL had a high expression in HCC samples. Increased CENPL was prominently associated with unfavorable survival, and maybe an independent prognostic factor of worse overall survival (OS), disease-specific survival (DSS), disease-free interval (DFI), progression-free interval (PFI). Additionally, CENPL expression was significantly correlated with immune cell infiltration and some markers. CENPL also contained a methylation site that was notably related to poor prognosis.
Conclusions: Elevated CENPL may be a promising prognostic marker and associate with immune infiltration in HCC.
Abbreviations
CENP: centromere protein; GEO: Gene Expression Omnibus; DEGs: differentially expressed genes; GO: Gene Ontology; KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes; HCC: hepatocellular carcinoma; RNA-seq: RNA sequencing; OS: overall survival; DSS: disease-specific survival; DFI: disease-free interval; PFI: progression-free interval.