Despite advances in the diagnosis and treatment of the central nervous system malignancy glioma, overall survival remains poor. Cytoskeleton-associated protein 2-like (CKAP2L), which plays key roles in neural progenitor cell division, has also been linked to poor prognosis in lung cancer. In the present study, we investigated the role of CKAP2L in glioma. From bioinformatics analyses of datasets from The Cancer Gene Atlas and the Chinese Glioma Genome Atlas, we found that CKAP2L expression correlates with tumor grade and overall survival. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) showed that MITOTIC_SPINDLE, G2M_CHECKPOINT, and E2F_TARGETS are crucially enriched phenotypes associated with high CKAP2L expression. Using U87MG, U118MG, and LNZ308 human glioma cells, we confirmed that CKAP2L knockdown with siCKAP2L inhibits glioma cell proliferation, migration, invasion, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Interestingly, CKAP2L knockdown also induced cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase, which is consistent with the GSEA finding. Finally, we observed that CKAP2L knockdown led to significant increases in miR-4496. Treating cells with exogenous miR-4496 mimicked the effect of CKAP2L knockdown, and the effects of CKAP2L knockdown could be suppressed by miR-4496 inhibition. These findings suggest that CKAP2L is a vital regulator of miR-4496 activity and that CKAP2L is a potentially useful prognostic marker in glioma.
Keywords: CGGA; CKAP2L; TCGA; UCSC Xena; glioblastoma; glioma; miR-4496; prognosis.