Open Access

ARTICLE

Immune-related DNA methylation signature associated with APLN expression predicts prognostic of hepatocellular carcinoma

FEIFEI TIAN¹, HUAN HU¹, DI WANG¹, HUAN DING¹, QINGJIA CHI², HUAPING LIANG³, WENLI ZENG^4,*

1 School of Life Science and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 610000, China
2 Department of Engineering Structure and Mechanics, School of Science, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China
3 State Key Laboratory of Trauma, Burns and Combined Injury, Research Institute of Surgery, Daping Hospital, The Army Medical University, Chongqing, 400042, China
4 Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University Nursing Department, Wuhan, 430070, China

* Corresponding Author: Wenli Zeng,

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Decoding Gene (including circRNA, lincRNA miRNA and mRNA) Expression)

BIOCELL 2022, 46(10), 2291-2301. https://doi.org/10.32604/biocell.2022.020198

Received 18 December 2021; Accepted 11 March 2022; Issue published 13 June 2022

Abstract

This study used transcriptome and epigenetic data to predict the prognosis of immune-related genes (IRGs) Apelin (APLN) in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The TCGA database has gene expression and clinical data for HCC. And DNA methylation 450 k data for HCC was download from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Xena browser. Performing clinical and prognostic analysis of APLN expression, results show that APLN is highly expressed in tumor samples. And it has an increasing trend with the development of clinical stage and T stage. To explore the prognostic role of APLN, the Immune-related DNA methylation (DNAm) sites associated with APLN analyzed by bioinformatics. Univariate COX screened the methylation sites that are related to both APLN and survival. The risk score related to methylation site signature was determined according to their least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) coefficients. Then the patients were divided into high-risk groups and low-risk groups. Significant differences in overall survival (OS) were found in the training cohort. Nomogram shows that APLN or methylation signature can effectively predict the prognosis of HCC patients. In summary, APLN may be a diagnostic and prognostic marker for HCC.

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Keywords

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