Abstract
Background: Cancer stem cells play a key role in the progression and therapy resistance of colon adenocarcinoma (COAD). In this study, we investigated and identified stem cell-regulated genes associated with COAD prognosis by co-expression network analysis.
Methods: R software was used to analyze the mRNA expression stemness index (mRNAsi) of COAD, and the differentially expressed genes were screened out to conduct weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA). Functional analysis and prognostic analysis were performed on the key modules and genes obtained from WGCNA. Multivariate Cox regression analysis was used to construct the prognosis prediction model of COAD.
Result: The mRNAsi in tumor tissue was significantly higher than that in normal tissue. The prognosis of patients in the high mRNAsi group was significantly better than that in the low mRNAsi group. Co-expression network analysis showed that the yellow module was significantly positively correlated with mRNAsi, while the brown and green modules were significantly negatively correlated with mRNAsi. We selected highly correlated genes from the three modules for survival analysis, and found that 20 genes were significantly correlated with patient prognosis. The above genes were included in a multivariate Cox regression analysis, and a risk prediction model consisting of eight genes was finally constructed. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve showed that the accuracy and specificity of the prognosis prediction model were high (AUC=0.738).
Conclusion: The 8 prognostic tumor stem cell regulation-related genes identified in this study can be used as sensitive indicators to predict the prognosis of COAD.