Overexpression of LncRNA HOTAIR is Associated with Poor Prognosis in Thyroid Carcinoma: A Study Based on TCGA and GEO Data

Abstract

The role of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) HOX transcript antisense RNA (HOTAIR) in thyroid carcinoma (TC) remains unclear. The current study was aimed to assess the clinical value of HOTAIR expression levels in TC based on publically available data and to evaluate its potential signaling pathways. The expression data of HOTAIR and clinical information concerning TC were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), respectively. Furthermore, 3 online biological databases, Starbase, Cbioportal, and Multi Experiment Matrix, were used to identify HOTAIR-related genes in TC. Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), and Panther pathway analyses were then undertaken to study the most enriched signaling pathways in TC (EASE score<0.1, Bonferroni<0.05). The TCGA results demonstrated that the expression level of HOTAIR in TC tissues was significantly increased compared with non-cancerous tissues (p<0.001). HOTAIR over-expression was significantly associated with poor survival in TC patients (p=0.03). Meta-analyses of GEO datasets revealed a trend consistent with the above results on HOTAIR expression levels in TC (SMD=0.23; 95%CI, 0.00-0.45; p=0.047). Finally, the results of functional analysis for HOTAIR-related genes indicated that HOTAIR might participate in tumorigenesis via the Wnt signaling pathway. In conclusion, our study demonstrates that HOTAIR may be involved in thyroid carcinogenesis, and the over-expression of HOTAIR could act as a biomarker associated with a poor outcome in TC patients. Moreover, the Wnt signaling pathway may be the key pathway regulated by HOTAIR in TC.

LncRNA PVT1 as an effective biomarker for cancer diagnosis and detection based on transcriptome data and meta-analysis

“…With the advance on RNA-Seq technique and improvement of bioinformatics, numerous lncRNAs were detected and the representative RNA sequencing data of cancer was stored in TCGA database [ 26 , 27 ], which provided more clues for cancer detection and therapy. However, only a few lncRNAs had been further explored to fully understand the role in development, diagnosis, and therapy of cancers.…”

Long noncoding RNAs: emerging players in thyroid cancer pathogenesis

“…Initially, a study investigated the involvement of 3 haplotype-tagging SNPs of HOTAIR in PTC and found that HOTAIR SNP (rs920778) was a PTC-susceptibility variant and further demonstrated that HOTAIR acts as an oncogene . A study based on TCGA and Gene Expression Omnibus data analysis showed that HOTAIR has been significantly overexpressed, associated with poor survival of thyroid cancer patients and likely to play a role in thyroid carcinogenesis via the Wnt signaling pathway (Li et al 2017b). These results suggest that HOTAIR is an onco-lncRNA and its overexpression could serve as a biomarker associated with poor outcome in thyroid cancer.…”

“…Furthermore, PTCSC1 and PTCSC2 were associated with thyroid cancer risk . HOTAIR overexpression has been associated with poor outcome (Li et al 2017b). LINC00271 and HIT000218960 have been associated with ETE, LNM, TNM stage III & IV and recurrence .…”

Uncovering Synergistic Mechanism of Chinese Herbal Medicine in the Treatment of Atrial Fibrillation with Obstructive Sleep Apnea Hypopnea Syndrome by Network Pharmacology

“…DAVID provides high-throughput functional annotation bioinformatics to perform functional annotation and enrichment analysis. e cutoff of recognized GO terms is set to FDR < 0.01 and KEGG pathways is set to P value <0.05 [26,27].…”