Expression and clinical significance of in gastrointestinal tumors: Bioinformatics analysis based on a public gene database.

BACKGROUND

To investigate the expression characteristics of ectodermal-neural cortex 1 () in gastrointestinal tumors and its potential value in judging the prognosis of patient survival.

METHODS

RNA sequence (RNA-seq) data and patient survival data related to stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD) and colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) in gastric cancer and colon cancer from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) were downloaded for expression difference analysis and Cox survival regression analysis. A Kaplan-Meier (KM) survival curve was plotted to analyze the tumor invasion level of patients with different expression levels, and the main influencing pathways of were analyzed by Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment analysis and protein network analysis.

RESULTS

The data of 405 STAD samples and 494 COAD clinical samples of TCGA were analyzed, and it was found that the expression of in tumor tissues of patients with both types of cancer was significantly higher than that in normal tissues, with Log fold change values of 1.97 and 2.06, respectively, P<0.001. Cox analysis revealed that the high expression of was not significantly correlated with the prognosis and survival time of patients with gastric cancer and patients with colon cancer: overall survival (OS) hazard ratio (HR): 1.039, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.890-1.213, P=0.627 for gastric cancer, OS HR: 0.886, 95% CI: 0.702-1.111, P=0.306 for colon cancer. KEGG pathway enrichment analysis of gene revealed that was mainly involved in neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction. The high expression of was associated with various immune cells and different cells such as basophils, CD4 memory T cells, CD4 TEM, and MV endothelial cells in gastric and colon cancers. The results of protein interaction network analysis suggested that may be involved in regulating neurite formation and neural crest cell differentiation.

CONCLUSIONS

expression is elevated in both gastric and colon cancers, and ENC1 is associated with various immune cells and different cells such as basophils, CD4 memory T cells, CD4 TEM, and MV endothelial cells in both gastric and colon cancers, but does not affect the survival and prognosis of patients.