Research Paper Volume 17, Issue 2 pp 588—606
Pan-cancer analysis of Methyltransferase-like 16 (METTL16) and validated in colorectal cancer
- 1 Department of Oncology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210011, China
Received: May 10, 2024 Accepted: December 11, 2024 Published: February 27, 2025
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206210How to Cite
Copyright: © 2025 Liu 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
Human Methyltransferase-like 16(METTL16) is an independent N6-methyladenosine (m6A) methyltransferase. Previous studies have proven METTL16 been linked with some types of cancers. However, comparative studies of the relevance of METTL16 across diverse tumors remain sparse. We comprehensively investigated the effect of METTL16 expression on tumor prognosis across human malignancies by analyzing multiple cancer-related databases like Tumor Immune Estimation Resource (TIMER) and human protein atlas (HPA). Bioinformatics data indicated that METTL16 was overexpressed in most of these human malignancies and was significantly associated with the prognosis of patients with cancer, especially in colorectal cancer (CRC). Subsequently, In vitro experiments, the utility of METTL16 that downregulation of its expression could result in reduced proliferation and migration of CRC cells. Our findings reveal novel insights into METTL16 expression and its biological functions in diverse cancer types, indicating that METTL16 could serve as a prognostic biomarker and plays an important role in colorectal cancer.
Abbreviations
METTL16: Methyltransferase-like 16; m6A: N6-methyladenosine; GEPIA: Gene Expression Profiling Interactive Analysis; HPA: Human Protein Atlas; IHC: immunohistochemistry; GO: Gene Ontology; KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes; SAM: S-adenosylmethionine; TIMER2: tumor immune estimation resource, version 2; GTEx: Genotype-Tissue Expression; CPTAC: Clinical proteomic tumor analysis consortium; OS: overall survival; DFS: disease-free survival; GSCA: Gene Set Cancer Analysis; CHOL: cholangiocarcinoma; HNSC: head and neck squamous cell carcinoma; LIHC: liver hepatocellular carcinoma; STAD: stomach adenocarcinoma; COAD: colon adenocarcinoma; ESCA: esophageal carcinoma; BLCA: bladder urothelial carcinoma; BRCA: breast invasive carcinoma; KICH: kidney chromophobe; LUSC: lung squamous cell carcinoma; UCEC: uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma; LUAD: lung adenocarcinoma; PRAD: prostate adenocarcinoma; THCA: thyroid carcinoma; CESC: cervical squamous cell carcinoma and endocervical adenocarcinoma; SKCM: skin cutaneous melanoma; OV: ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma; UCS: uterine carcinosarcoma; GBM: glioblastoma multiforme; LGG: low-grade glioma; KIRP: kidney renal papillary cell carcinoma; KIRC: kidney renal clear cell carcinoma; PAAD: pancreatic adenocarcinoma; TGCT: testicular germ cell tumors; LAML: acute myeloid leukemia; ACC: adrenocortical carcinoma; FANTOM5: function annotation of the mammalian genome 5; CNV: copy number variations; EMT: epithelial–mesenchymal transition; CDH2: N-cadherin; FN1: ibronectin 1; TWIST1: twist family bHLH transcription factor 1; PPI: protein–protein interaction; BP: biological process; CC: cellular component; MF: molecular function; ceRNAs: competing endogenous RNAs; U6 snRNA: U6 small nuclear RNA; TME: the tumor microenvironment; lncRNAs: Long non-coding RNAs; circRNAs: circular RNAs.