Systematic pan-cancer analysis showed that RAD51AP1 was associated with immune microenvironment, tumor stemness, and prognosis

Renwang Liu; Guangsheng Zhu; Mingbiao Li; Peijun Cao; Xuanguang Li; Xiuwen Zhang; Hua Huang; Zuoqing Song; Jun Chen

doi:10.3389/fgene.2022.971033

Systematic pan-cancer analysis showed that RAD51AP1 was associated with immune microenvironment, tumor stemness, and prognosis

Front Genet. 2022 Nov 16:13:971033. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2022.971033. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Renwang Liu^{1

2}, Guangsheng Zhu^{1

2}, Mingbiao Li², Peijun Cao^{1

2}, Xuanguang Li^{1

2}, Xiuwen Zhang^{1

2}, Hua Huang^{1

2}, Zuoqing Song^{1

2}, Jun Chen^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Lung Cancer Surgery, Lung Cancer Institute, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, China.
² Tianjin Key Laboratory of Lung Cancer Metastasis and Tumour Microenvironment, Lung Cancer Institute, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, China.

Abstract

Although RAD51 associated protein 1 (RAD51AP1) is crucial in genome stability maintenance, it also promotes cancer development with an unclear mechanism. In this study, we collected intact expression data of RAD51AP1 from the public database, and verified it was significantly over-expressed in 33 cancer types and correlated with poor prognosis in 13 cancer types, including glioma, adrenocortical carcinoma, lung adenocarcinoma. We further authenticated that RAD51AP1 is up-regulated in several typical cancer cell lines and promotes cancer cell proliferation in vitro. Moreover, we also demonstrated that RAD51AP1 was significantly positively related to cancer stemness score mRNAsi in 27 cancer types and broadly correlated to tumor-infiltrating immune cells in various cancers in a diverse manner. It was also negatively associated with immunophenoscore (IPS) and Estimation of STromal and Immune cells in MAlignant Tumours using Expression data (ESTIMATE) scores and positively correlated with mutant-allele tumor heterogeneity (MATH), tumor mutational burden (TMB), microsatellite instability (MSI), and PD-L1 expression in multiple cancers. The tumor stemness enhancing and tumor immune microenvironment affecting functions of RAD51AP1 might compose its carcinogenesis mechanism. Further investigations beyond the bioinformatics level should confirm these findings in each specific cancer.

Keywords: RAD51AP1; bioinformatics analysis; carcinogenesis; pan-cancer; tumor immune microenvironment.