The Diagnostic Value of LGALS1 in Esophageal Cancer and its Potential Molecular Pathways via Bioinformatic Analysis

Abstract

Background: Esophageal cancer is one of the most common malignant tumors. The purpose of this study was to reveal the expression of LGALS1 in esophagus cancer (ESCA) and its clinical value, and to explore the mechanism of LGALS1 in the occurrence and development of ESCA.Methods: Oncomine, Tumor Immune Estimation Resource (Timer) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database were used to analyze the expression of LGALS1 in ESCA and its value in the diagnosis of ESCA. The correlation between LGALS1 and the clinicopathological characteristics of ESCA patients was analyzed in the Ualcan database. In TCGA database, we performed Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), and Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) to elucidate the potential mechanism underlying the role of LGALS1 in ESAC. LGALS1 co-expressed genes were imported into the String database to build a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. The CytoHubba plug-in in Cytoscape was used to screen the hub gene and was verified in Gene Expression Profiling Interactive Analysis (GEPIA) and TCGA database.Results: LGALS1 was highly expressed in ESCA tissues. Increasing the expression level of LGALS1 was related to age, ethnicity, clinical stage, tumor grade, and histological subtype of ESCA patients, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis showed that the area under the curve (AUC) was 0.8511 (P <0.001). There are 482 LGALS1 co-expressed genes. GO and KEGG show that LGALS1 co-expressed genes are mainly involved in endothelial cell differentiation, transforming growth factor receptor signaling pathway, epithelial cell proliferation, ECM receptor interactions, leukocyte migration, transcriptional disorders during cancer, PI3K/AKT signaling pathway and other processes. GSEA showed that elevated LGALS1 was mainly enriched for ECM receptor interactions, cancer pathways, and TGF BETA signaling pathways. The Hub genes COL1A1, FN1, COL1A2, COL3A1, COL5A1, COL5A2, COL4A2, COL18A1, and COL6A1 are higher expressed in ESCA tissues and have diagnostic significance in ESCA.Conclusion: LGALS1 expression is elevated in ESCA patients and may be a potential diagnostic marker for ESCA patients. PI3K/AKT signaling pathway, TGF BETA signaling pathway, cancer pathway, cytokine and cytokine interaction may be an important pathway for regulation in occurrence and development of ESCA.