Identification of m7G Methylation-Related miRNA Signature Associated with Survival and Immune Microenvironment Regulation in Uterine Corpus Endometrial Carcinoma

Biomed Res Int. 2022 Nov 23:2022:8776678. doi: 10.1155/2022/8776678. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Background: N7-methylguanosine (m7G) has been implicated in the development of cancer. The role of m7G-related miRNAs in the survival prediction of UCEC patients has not been investigated. Current research was the first to construct an m7G-related miRNA model to accurately predict the survival of patients with uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma (UCEC) and to explore immune cell infiltration and immune activity in the tumor microenvironment.

Methods: RNA-seq data and clinical information of UCEC patients were derived from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Using the TargetScan online database, we predicted miRNAs linked to the m7G-related genes and identified miRNAs which were significantly associated with the survival in UCEC patients and constructed a risk scoring model. The TCGA-UCEC cases were scored according to the risk model, and the high- and low-risk groups were divided by the median risk value. Gene enrichment analysis and immune cell infiltration and immune function analysis were performed using "clusterProfiler" and "GSVA" packages in R.

Results: The survival prediction model consisted of 9 miRNAs, namely, hsa-miR-1301, hsa-miR-940, hsa-miR-592, hsa-miR-3170, hsa-miR-876, hsa-miR-215, hsa-miR-934, hsa-miR-3920, and hsa-miR-216b. Survival of UCEC patients in the high-risk group was worse than that in the low-risk group (p < 0.001). The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve showed that the model had good predictive performance, and the area under the curve was 0.800, 0.690, and 0.705 for 1-, 3-, and 5-year survival predictions, respectively. There were differences in the degree of immune cell infiltration and immune activity between the low-risk and high-risk groups. The expression levels of the identified differentially expressed genes correlated with the susceptibility to multiple anticancer drugs.

Conclusions: The survival prediction model constructed based on 9 m7G-related miRNAs had good predictive performance.

MeSH terms

  • Carcinoma, Endometrioid*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Methylation
  • MicroRNAs* / genetics
  • Protein Processing, Post-Translational
  • Tumor Microenvironment / genetics

Substances

  • MicroRNAs
  • MIRN1301 microRNA, human
  • MIRN876 microRNA, human