Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is a frequently diagnosed malignant tumor that is highly invasive and lethal. The prognosis of patients with LUAD still needs to be improved, as conventional treatment is remarkably well tolerated. In this study, the expression profile of LUAD in the TCGA database was used for differential expression analysis, and differential expression genes were determined to construct a weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) for dividing and finding the gene modules with the highest correlation with tumor stage. Here, METTL5, DDX23, GPSM2, CEP95, WDCP, and METL17 were identified as hub genes. According to the relation degree, METTL5 was determined as the candidate gene in this study. Difference analysis and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve were applied to identify the predictive performance of METTL5 in LUAD, and Kaplan-Meier (KM) analysis showed that the prognosis of LUAD patients with high METTL5 expression was poor. Further GSEA analysis showed that high-expressed METTL5 was related to epithelial-mesenchymal transition and other pathways. Therefore, METTL5 may be involved in the occurrence and malignant progression of LUAD. The current findings provide an effective molecular target for early diagnosis of LUAD, helping monitor the malignant progression of LUAD and improve the prognosis of LUAD patients.
Keywords: DDX23; METTL5; cancer genome map; lung adenocarcinoma; weighted gene co-expression network analysis.