527 Expression of OPN3 correlating to tumor initiation and development in cutaneous melanoma

Abstract

The function of OPN3 in melanoma remains largely unknown. To assess the biological role of OPN3 in the initiation and development of cutaneous melanoma, we first systematically investigated the expression patterns of OPN3 gene from human melanoma based on the available three independent gene expression datasets (GEO GSE3189, GSE8401 and GSE4587). We found that the OPN3 mRNA was upregulated in human melanoma when compared to normal skin and nevus tissue samples, especially in vertical growth phase melanoma. Additionally, no statistically significant difference was evident between the primary melanoma and metastasis of melanoma tissues. By the weighted correlation network and protein-protein association networks analysis, it suggested that OPN3 might play a role in the initiation and development of cutaneous melanoma. Next, to further illustrate the possible mechanisms by which OPN3 mediates melanoma cell tumorigenicity, RNA-seq analysis was performed on low expression of OPN3 and untreated M14 human skin melanoma cells. In this present study, our heatmap revealed that 5029 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were upregulated, while 4495 DEGs were downregulated. Notably, in GO (Gene Ontology) term enrichment analysis our results indicated that the DEGs were evidently enriched in post-transcriptional gene regulation and cell cycle regulation, suggesting that OPN3 was mainly involved in proliferation and cell cycle regulation. The KEGG pathway analysis, OPN3 was dramatically enriched in cell cycle regulation process, neurotrophin signaling pathway and mRNA surveillance pathway. Taken together, we here showed that high expression of OPN3 can promote melanoma initiation and development by regulating cell cycle progression and tumor-associated signaling pathway.