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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 23|pp 25304—25324

GDI2 is a novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarker in hepatocellular carcinoma

Wen Zhang1,2, Zhongjian Liu2, Shilin Xia3, Lei Yao4, Lan Li5, Ziying Gan2, Hui Tang2, Qiang Guo2, Xinmin Yan2, Zhiwei Sun1,2
  • 1School of Medicine, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Affiliated by The First People’s Hospital of Yunnan Province, Kunming 650504, Yunnan, China
  • 2Yunnan Digestive Endoscopy Clinical Medical Center, Gastroenterology Department, The First People’s Hospital of Yunnan Province, The Affiliated Hospital of Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650032, Yunnan, China
  • 3Clinical Laboratory of Integrative Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, Dalian 116011, Liaoning, China
  • 4General Surgery Department, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150086, Heilongjiang, China
  • 5Ophthalmology Department, Jiangxi Provincial People’s Hospital, Nanchang 330006, Jiangxi, China
Received: February 9, 2021Accepted: November 22, 2021Published: December 11, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203748

Copyright: © 2021 Zhang 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: GDP Dissociation inhibitor 2 (GDI2) gene has been correlated with some important biological processes in a variety of cancers, whereas the role of GDI2 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is ill-defined. We aimed to demonstrate the relationship between GDI2 and HCC based on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data mining.

Methods: The expression of GDI2 was compared between cancer and normal tissues of 371 HCC patients collected from TCGA-LIHC, and verified in HCC cell lines. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was applied to annotate biological function of GDI2. Furthermore, Wilcoxon rank sum test, Logistics regression, as well as Cox regression and Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, were employed to evaluate the association of GDI2 expression with clinicopathological characteristics, and survival status of HCC patients, respectively.

Results: It showed that the expression of GDI2 was much higher in tumor tissues than in normal tissues (P < 0.001) of HCC patients. And the elevated expression of GDI2 was correlated with more aggressive HCC tumor status, including severe primary tumor extent, advanced pathological stage, serious histologic grade, and mutated TP53 status (P < 0.05). Moreover, high GDI2 expression was strongly associated with a poor survival rate (P < 0.001). Both enrichment and immune infiltration analyses implied that GDI2-associated signaling mainly involve lipid metabolism and extracellular matrix (ECM) constructing pathways related to tumor microenvironment (TME) (P < 0.05).

Conclusions: The elevated expression of GDI2 predicts poor prognosis in HCC patients, indicating that GDI2 could be applied as a predictive biomarker for diagnosis and prognosis of HCC.