Research Paper Volume 15, Issue 21 pp 11831—11844
RAI2 acts as a tumor suppressor with functional significance in gastric cancer
- 1 Department of Pathology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, P.R. China
- 2 Department of Pathology, Kunshan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Kunshan, P.R. China
- 3 Department of General Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, P.R. China
Received: May 18, 2023 Accepted: September 25, 2023 Published: October 25, 2023
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205135How to Cite
Copyright: © 2023 Lou 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
Metastasis of gastric cancer (GC) is one of the major causes of death among GC patients. GC metastasis involves numerous biological processes, yet the specific molecular biological mechanisms have not been elucidated. Here, we report a novel tumor suppressor, retinoic acid-induced 2 (RAI2), which is located in the Xp22 region of the chromosome and plays a role in inhibiting GC growth and invasion. In this study, integrated analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) datasets and immunohistochemistry staining data suggested that RAI2 expression in GC samples was low. Moreover, the immune infiltration analysis indicated that low expression of RAI2 in GC was associated with a higher intensity of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) and an abundance of Programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) analysis further revealed that RAI2 regulated some pathways including the GAP junction, focal adhesion and ECM receptor interaction pathway, immune regulation, PI3K-Akt signaling, MAPK signaling, cell cycle, and DNA replication. Furthermore, the knockdown of RAI2 promoted GC cell proliferation, migration, and invasion in vitro. Taken together, these results suggest that the tumor suppressor RAI2 could be a potential target for the development of anti-cancer strategies in GC.