TUBB, a robust biomarker with satisfying abilities in diagnosis, prognosis, and immune regulation via a comprehensive pan-cancer analysis

Zaifu Zhu; Wei Zhang; Shaohu Huo; Tiantuo Huang; Xi Cao; Ying Zhang

doi:10.3389/fmolb.2024.1365655

TUBB, a robust biomarker with satisfying abilities in diagnosis, prognosis, and immune regulation via a comprehensive pan-cancer analysis

Front Mol Biosci. 2024 May 2:11:1365655. doi: 10.3389/fmolb.2024.1365655. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Zaifu Zhu^#¹, Wei Zhang^#², Shaohu Huo¹, Tiantuo Huang¹, Xi Cao^{3

4}, Ying Zhang^{5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Pediatrics, First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, China.
² Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, China.
³ Department of Pharmacy, First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, China.
⁴ The Grade 3 Pharmaceutical Chemistry Laboratory of State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Hefei, Anhui, China.
⁵ Department of Pathology, First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, China.
⁶ Pathology Center, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Purpose: TUBB can encode a beta-tubulin protein. At present, the role of TUBB has not been ascertained in cancers. Hence, the importance of further systematic pan-cancer analyses is stressed to explore its value in the diagnosis, prognosis, and immune function of cancers.

Methods: By collecting and handling integrative data from the TCGA, Firehose, UCSC Xena, cBioPortal, GEO, CPTAC, TIMER2.0, TISCH, CellMiner, GDSC, and CTRP databases, we explored the potential diagnostic and prognostic roles of TUBB in pan-cancers from multiple angles. Moreover, the GSEA analysis was conducted to excavate the biological functions of TUBB in pan-cancers. In addition, survival profiles were described, and the differential expressions of TUBB in different molecular subtypes were discussed. Also, we utilized the cMAP function to search drugs or micro-molecules that have an impact on TUBB expressions.

Results: Based on the TCGA data, we found that TUBB was differentially expressed in a variety of tumors and showed an early-diagnostic value. Mutations, somatic copy number alterations, and DNA methylation would lead to its abnormal expression. TUBB expressions had relations with many clinical features. What's more, TUBB expressions were validated to be related to many metabolism-related, metastasis-related, and immune-related pathways. High TUBB expressions were proved to have a great impact on the prognosis of various types of cancers and would affect the sensitivity of some drugs. We also demonstrated that the expression of TUBB was significantly correlated to immunoregulator molecules and biomarkers of lymphocyte subpopulation infiltration.

Conclusion: TUBB and its regulatory genes were systemically analyzed in this study, showing that TUBB had satisfying performances in disease diagnosing and prognosis predicting of multiple cancers. It could remodel the tumor microenvironment and play an integral role in guiding cancer therapies and forecasting responses to chemotherapy.

Keywords: TME; TUBB; diagnosis; pan-cancer; prognosis.

Grants and funding

The authors declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 82204290), the Clinical Science Foundation of Anhui Medical University (Grant Number: 2021xkj129), and the Foundation by basic and clinical cooperative research promotion program of Anhui Medical University (Grant Number: 2022xkjT023).