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Research Paper|Volume 16, Issue 1|pp 538—549

RBCK1 overexpression is associated with immune cell infiltration and poor prognosis in hepatocellular carcinoma

Jingjing Yu1,2, Tianming Liu2, Mingjiang Liu1,3, Hu Jin1,4, Zaiwa Wei1,5
  • 1The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi 530021, China
  • 2Department of General Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China
  • 3Department of Hepatopancreatobiliary Surgery, Yantai Yuhuangding Hospital Affiliated to Medical College of Qingdao University, Yantai, China
  • 4Department of Critical Care Medicine, Liuzhou People’s Hospital, Liuzhou, China
  • 5Guangxi Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Guilin Medical University, Guangxi, China
* Equal contribution
Received: July 16, 2023Accepted: October 24, 2023Published: January 11, 2024
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205393

Copyright: © 2024 Yu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

RBCK1 is an important E3 ubiquitin ligase, which plays an important role in many major diseases. However, the function and mechanism of RBCK1 in pan-cancer and its association with immune cell infiltration have not been reported. The purpose of this study is to find out the expression of RBCK1 in cancer, and to explore the relationship between RBCK1 and the prognosis of patients. Our results show that the expression of RBCK1 is up-regulated in a variety of malignant tumors, and is closely related to the prognosis of patients. Further studies have shown that RBCK1 regulates protein expression in the nucleus and plays an important role in ribosome and valine, leucine, and isoleucine degradation. Genetic variation analysis showed that RBCK1 was mainly involved in missense mutations in multiple tumors, and mutated patients showed poor prognoses. Further studies showed that RBCK1 may be interacted with proteins such as RNRPB, MCRS1, TRIB3, MKKS and ARPC3. Through protein interaction analysis, we found 43 proteins interacting with RBCK1 in liver cancer. We also analyzed immune cell infiltration and found that RBCK1 expression was positively correlated with T cells and macrophages, while it was negatively correlated with neutrophils, NK cells, and DCs in liver cancer. Finally, we confirmed experimentally that RBCK1 can significantly inhibit the apoptosis and invasion of HCC. Therefore, we speculate that RBCK1 plays an important regulatory role in the occurrence and development of HCC.