J Cancer 2020; 11(6):1542-1554. doi:10.7150/jca.36998 This issue Cite
Research Paper
1. Department of Pathology, First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region 530021, P. R. China
2. Department of Medical Oncology, First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region 530021, P. R. China
3. Department of Urology, First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region 530021, P. R. China
# Li Gao and Rong-quan He contributed equally to this study.
Alternative splicing (AS) is a major mechanism that greatly enhanced the diversity of proteome. Mounting evidence demonstrated that aberration of AS are important steps for the initiation and progression of human cancers. Here, we comprehensively investigated the association between whole landscape of AS profiles and the survival outcome of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) patients using RNA-seq data from TCGA SpliceSeq. Because of the limited number size of deaths in kidney chromophobe renal cell carcinoma (KICH) and papillary renal cell carcinoma (KIRP) TCGA cohorts, we only conducted survival analysis in kidney clear renal cell carcinoma (KIRC). We further constructed prognostic index (PI) based on prognosis-related AS events and built correlation network for splicing factors and prognosis-related AS events. According to the results, a total of 5351 AS events in 3522 genes were significantly correlated with the overall survival (OS) of kidney clear cell renal cell carcinoma (KIRC) patients. Seven of the PI models exhibited preferable prognosis-predicting capacity for KIRC with PI-ALL reaching the highest area under curve value of 0.875. The splicing regulatory network between splicing factors and prognosis-related AS events depicted a tangled web of relationships between them. One of the splicing factors: KHDRBS3 was validated by immunohistochemistry to be down-regulated in KIRC tissues. In conclusion, the powerful efficiency of risk stratification of PI models indicated the potential of AS signature as promising prognostic markers for KIRC and the splicing regulation network provided possible genetic mechanism of KIRC.
Keywords: alternative splicing, prognostic index, splicing factor, kidney clear renal cell carcinoma, the cancer genome atlas.