SQLE is a promising prognostic and immunological biomarker and correlated with immune Infiltration in Sarcoma

Abstract

Squalene epoxidase (SQLE) is an essential enzyme involved in cholesterol biosynthesis. However, its role in sarcoma and its correlation with immune infiltration remains unclear. All original data were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). SQLE expression was explored using the TCGA database, and correlations between SQLE and cancer immune characteristics were analyzed via the TISIDB databases. Generally, SQLE is predominantly overexpressed and has diagnostic and prognostic value in sarcoma. Upregulated SQLE was associated with poorer overall survival, poorer disease-specific survival, and tumor multifocality in sarcoma. Mechanistically, we identified a hub gene that included a total of 82 SQLE-related genes, which were tightly associated with histone modification pathways in sarcoma patients. SQLE expression was negatively correlated with infiltrating levels of dendritic cells and plasmacytoid dendritic cells and positively correlated with Th2 cells. SQLE expression was negatively correlated with the expression of chemokines (CCL19 and CX3CL1) and chemokine receptors (CCR2 and CCR7) in sarcoma. In conclusion, SQLE may be used as a prognostic biomarker for determining prognosis and immune infiltration in sarcoma.