In pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, differential expression of the methyltransferases METTL1, METTL6, and METTL10 is linked to a worse overall survival rate

Abstract

PDAC (pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma) is one of the worst malignancies in men. We used a public datasetof resected tumors from 79 individuals with PDAC to undertake global differential gene expression analysis(1). We discovered that methyltransferase-like 6 and methyltransferase-like 10, METTL6 and METTL10, wereamong the most differentially expressed genes transcriptome-wide and that their expression was significantlyassociated with poorer survival when we compared the transcriptomes of these tumors based on overallsurvival greater or less than 1 year from diagnosis. METTL6 is a tRNA methyltransferase that is involved inthe m3c RNA modification (2), whereas METTL10 is a lysine methyltransferase that is involved in theeukaryotic translation factor EF1A1 (3). When patients with PDAC were categorized based on survival, asimilar enzyme, METTL1 (5, 6), was similarly differently expressed, according to a separate dataset (4). Theseresults suggest that METTL1, METTL6, and METTL10 might be used as therapeutic targets in a disease withno known targeted medicines, a median survival of 6 months, and a 5-year survival rate of 3-5 percent (7).