Abstract
Purpose: Melanoma is the most aggressive and life-threatening cutaneous cancer. To explore new treatment strategies, it is essential to identify the mechanisms underlying melanoma tumorigenesis and metastasis.Methods: In the current study, we demonstrated altered expression of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) and messenger RNA (mRNA) in melanoma using data from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment, and protein–protein interaction (PPI) analyses were conducted. We also constructed a functional lncRNA-mRNA regulatory network and Kaplan-Meier analysis.Results: We identified 246 differentially expressed (DE) lncRNAs and 856 DEmRNAs. A total of 184 DElncRNAs and 428 DEmRNAs were upregulated in metastatic melanoma, while all others were downregulated. Additionally, we investigated the co-expression pattern of 363 genes, among which 26 upregulated lncRNAs, 9 down- regulated lncRNAs, 49 upregulated mRNAs and 151 downregulated mRNAs were identified as being co-expressed with others. Survival analysis suggested high levels of 14 lncRNAs and 10 mRNAs may significantly increase or decrease overall survival. These differentially expressed genes are also potentially prognostic in melanoma.Conclusion: Our findings observe potential roles for lncRNAs and mRNAs during melanoma progression and provide candidate biomarkers for further studies.
Highlights
Cutaneous melanoma is the most aggressive type of skin cancer, and melanoma metastasis accounts for the vast majority of patient deaths from skin cancer
We investigated whether the co-expressed DElncRNAs-differentially expressed mRNAs (DEmRNAs) were correlated with potential good or poor overall survival (OS)
A gene expression dataset generated by RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) was downloaded from TCGA
Summary
Cutaneous melanoma is the most aggressive type of skin cancer, and melanoma metastasis accounts for the vast majority of patient deaths from skin cancer. Surgical excision is used as the standard approach to remove localized lesions and results in a good prognosis. The prognosis of patients with metastatic melanoma is extremely poor. Immunotherapy and molecularly targeted drugs are emerging as attractive new therapeutic approaches (Reddy et al, 2016), their utility is restricted to only a portion of patients who often acquire drug resistance, and the therapeutic options against. LncRNAs/mRNAs in Melanoma late-stage melanoma remain very limited. A comprehensive understanding of the genetic and epigenetic underpinnings of melanoma initiation and progression would facilitate the identification of new biomarkers and therapeutic targets for metastatic melanoma
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