Background: Long non-coding ribonucleic acid (lncRNA) ELFN1 antisense RNA 1 (ELFN1-AS1) is involved in the pathogenesis of many different cancers. But the current research on the relationship between lncRNA ELFN1-AS1 and pancreatic cancer is still blank.
Methods: We investigated the role of lncRNA ELFN1-AS1 in the pathogenesis of pancreatic cancer using bioinformatics, in vitro and in vivo experiments in pancreatic cancer cell lines, and surgically removed clinical samples.
Results: Through bio-information analysis and in vitro and in vivo experiments, we found that LncRNA ELFN1-AS1 was highly enriched in pancreatic cancer data sets and highly expressed in pancreatic cancer cell lines and tissues. The knocking down of lncRNA ELFN1-AS1 significantly increased cancer cell death and growth arrest. Xenografts in nude mice showed that the growth of SW1990 cells in the mice group with a stable knock down of lncRNA ELFN1-AS1 was significantly slower than that in the control group.
Conclusions: The experimental results show that the expression of LncRNA ELFN1-AS1 is related to the growth and invasion ability of pancreatic cancer cells. By further studying the function of LncRNA ELFN1-AS1 in pancreatic cancer, LncRNA ELFN1-AS1 was found to be involved in the epithelial-mesenchymal transition process in pancreatic cancer.
Keywords: Bioinformatics; epithelial-mesenchymal transition; long non-coding RNA; pancreatic cancer.
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