Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common malignancies in the world and has a high mortality rate. It is believed that dysfunction in the expression of mucins and aberrant expression of some lncRNAs are associated with the occurrence and development of CRC. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the expression of MUC15, MUC16, MUC20, PCAT1, CCAT1 and HOTAIR genes in colorectal cancer and its relationship with clinicopathological variables.
Materials and methods: This research was prospective case-control study. Tumors from CRC patients were collected from the Taleghani Hospital, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. RNA extraction and cDNA synthesis were performed using the corresponding kits. The gene primer was designed and RT-PCR was used to evaluate gene expression. The t-test and ANOVA were employed to examine the differences between groups. Data analysis was performed using Prism8 software.
Results: The results of the present study showed that the expression of MUC15 (P = 0.0012), MUC20 (P = 0.009) and CCAT1 (P = 0.001) genes in patients with colorectal cancer were significantly different from tumor margin samples. There were also associations between the expression of the studied genes and clinicopathological variables such as grade and stage of colorectal cancer tumor as well as the age of the patients. The area under the curves (AUC) for the MUC15 0.953 (95% CI 7565-0.9897, P = 0.0003), MUC20 0.782 (95% CI 0.6163-0.9482, P = 0.008) and CCAT1 0.917 (95% CI 0.8015-1, P = 0.0003) were calculated by ROC analysis.
Conclusion: The current experiment revealed changes in expression level of mucin genes and lncRNAs in CRC and its different stages, showing that they can be considered as biomarkers for diagnosis of this cancer.
Keywords: Colorectal cancer; Diagnosis and prognosis; Epigenetic factor; Long non-coding RNAs; MUC genes.
Copyright © 2022 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.