Background: Long noncoding RNAs have been shown to play crucial roles in cancer biology, while the long noncoding RNA landscapes of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma have not been completely characterized. We aimed to determine whether long noncoding RNA could serve as early diagnostic biomarkers for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
Method: We conducted a genome-wide microarray analysis on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and their adjacent noncancerous tissues from 8 Chinese patients.
Results: A total of 3352 significantly differentially expressed long noncoding RNAs were detected. Of total, 1249 long noncoding RNAs were upregulated and 2103 were downregulated (fold change ≥2, P < 0.05, FDR <0.05). These differentially expressed long noncoding RNAs were not evenly distributed among chromosomes in human genome. Hierarchical clustering of these differentially expressed long noncoding RNAs revealed large variabilities in long noncoding RNA expression among individual patient, indicating that certain long noncoding RNAs could play a unique role or be used as a biomarker for specific subtype of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Gene Ontology enrichment and pathway analysis identified several remarkably dysregulated pathways in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tissue, such as interferon-γ-mediated signaling pathway, mitotic cell cycle and proliferation, extracellular matrix receptor interaction, focal adhesion, and regulation of actin cytoskeleton. The co-expression network analysis detected 393 potential interactions between 80 differentially expressed long noncoding RNAs and 105 messenger RNAs. We experimentally verified 7 most markedly dysregulated long noncoding RNAs from the network.
Conclusion: Our study provided a genome-wide survey of dysregulated long noncoding RNAs and long noncoding RNA/messenger RNA co-regulation networks in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tissue. These dysregulated long noncoding RNA/messenger RNA networks could be used as biomarkers to provide early diagnosis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma or its subtype, predict prognosis, and evaluate treatment efficacy.
Keywords: biomarkers; genome-wide analysis; lncRNA/mRNA co-expression; long noncoding RNA (lncRNA); pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC).