Research Paper|Volume 14, Issue 12|pp 5211—5222

DNA methylation-regulated SNX20 overexpression correlates with poor prognosis, immune cell infiltration, and low-grade glioma progression

Xi Chen¹, Xiulin Jiang², Heping Wang¹, Chunyan Wang³, Chenyang Wang³, Chenglong Pan³, Fan Zhou⁴, Jintao Tian¹, Xiaoqun Niu⁵, Zhi Nie⁶, Wei Chen⁴, Xiaobin Huang¹, Jun Pu¹, Chen Li⁷

¹Department of Neurosurgery, The second Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, Kunming 650223, China
²Key Laboratory of Animal Models and Human Disease Mechanisms of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Yunnan Province, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Kunming 650223, Yunnan, China
³Department of Pathology, First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, Kunming 650032, Yunnan, China
⁴Hematology and Rheumatology Department, The Pu’er People’s Hospital, Pu’er 665000, China
⁵Department of Respiratory Medicine, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, Kunming, Yunnan Province, China
⁶Department of Neurology, First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, Kunming 650032, Yunnan, China
⁷Department of Biology, Chemistry, Pharmacy, Free University of Berlin, Berlin 14195, Germany

* Equal contribution

Received: January 29, 2022Accepted: June 14, 2022Published: June 27, 2022

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204144

Copyright: © 2022 Jiang 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

We revealed that SNX20 was up-regulated in LGG, and its higher expression was associated with adverse clinical outcomes and poor clinical characteristics, including WHO grade, IDH mutation, 1p/19q codeletion, and primary therapy outcome. The results of the Cox regression analysis revealed that SNX20 was an independent factor for the prognosis of low-grade glioma. Meanwhile, we also established a nomogram based on SNX20 to predict the 1-, 3-, or 5-year survival in LGG patients. Furthermore, we found that DNA hypomethylation results in its overexpression in LGG. In addition, functional annotation confirmed that SNX20 was mainly involved in the immune response and inflammatory response related signaling pathways, including the T cell receptor signaling pathway, natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity, and the NF-kappa B signaling pathway. Finally, we determined that increased expression of SNX20 was correlated with infiltration levels of various immune cells and immune checkpoint in LGG. Importantly, we found that SNX20 was highly expressed in glioma cell lines. Depletion of SNX20 significantly inhibits glioma cell proliferation and migration abilities. This is the first study to identify SNX20 as a new potential prognostic biomarker and characterize the functional roles of SNX20 in the progression of LGG, and provides a novel potential diagnostic and therapeutic biomarker for LGG in the future.