Potential role of lnc-METRNL-1 in the occurrence and prognosis of oral squamous cell carcinoma.

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Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is one of the most common malignant tumors of the head and neck with poor prognosis. This study aimed to explore the role of lnc-METRNL-1 in occurrence and prognosis of OSCC patients. Expression of lnc-METRNL-1 was compared between OSCC samples and paracancerous samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Additionally, the lnc-METRNL-1 expression in cell lines was detected by using qRT-PCR. The overall survival (OS) was estimated based on the Kaplan-Meier and the immune cell infiltration was evaluated using CIBERSORT. Significantly enriched biological pathways were identified by Gene-set enrichment analysis (GSEA). Differential expression analysis was done in edgeR package. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways of differential expression genes were conducted using DAVID version 6.8. The lnc-METRNL-1 expression in OSCC was significantly lower than that in paracancerous samples, and patients with low lnc-METRNL-1 expression had poorer OS. Additionally, lnc-METRNL-1 was significantly down-regulated in OSCC cell lines compared with normal cell line. High expression of lnc-METRNL-1 was closely associated with the activation of several tumor metabolic and metabolism-related pathways. Besides, aberrant lnc-METRNL-1 expression was found to be related to the differential infiltration of immune cells in tumor tissue, such as regulatory T cells, and Macrophages. Low lnc-METRNL-1 expression was probably a poor prognostic biomarker for OSCC patients. Moreover, the potential role of lnc-METRNL-1 in the onset of OSCC was partly revealed.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13205-023-03674-0.