Aberrant expression of PROS1 correlates with human papillary thyroid cancer progression

Jing Wang; Minxiang Lei; Zhijie Xu

doi:10.7717/peerj.11813

Aberrant expression of PROS1 correlates with human papillary thyroid cancer progression

PeerJ. 2021 Aug 3:9:e11813. doi: 10.7717/peerj.11813. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Jing Wang^{1

2}, Minxiang Lei¹, Zhijie Xu^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Endocrinology, Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China.
² Department of Pathology, Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China.
³ National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Disorders, Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

Abstract

Background: Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is the most common type of thyroid cancer (TC). Considering the important association between cellular immunity and PTC progression, it is worth exploring the biological significance of immune-related signaling in PTC.

Methods: Several bioinformatics tools, such as R software, WEB-based Gene SeT AnaLysis Toolkit (WebGestalt), Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery (DAVID), Search Tool for the Retrieval of Interacting Genes (STRING) and Cytoscape were used to identify the immune-related hub genes in PTC. Furthermore, in vitro experiments were adopted to identify the proliferation and migration ability of PROS1 knockdown groups and control groups in PTC cells.

Results: The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of five datasets from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) contained 154 upregulated genes and 193 downregulated genes, with Protein S (PROS1) being the only immune-related hub gene. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) have been conducted to prove the high expression of PROS1 in PTC. Moreover, PROS1 expression was significantly correlated with lymph nodes classification. Furthermore, knockdown of PROS1 by shRNAs inhibited the cell proliferation and cell migration in PTC cells.

Conclusions: The findings unveiled the clinical relevance and significance of PROS1 in PTC and provided potential immune-related biomarkers for PTC development and prognosis.

Keywords: Cell migration; Cell proliferation; Immune-related signaling; PROS1; Papillary thyroid carcinoma.

Associated data

figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.14627367.v1

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (No. 2020JJ5934) and the Internal Medicine Research Fund of Xiangya Hospital (3302012001103). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.