Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 5 pp 7570—7588
Low expression of NLRP1 is associated with a poor prognosis and immune infiltration in lung adenocarcinoma patients
- 1 Department of Oncology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410008, Hunan, China
- 2 Department of Life Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L8, Canada
- 3 Key Laboratory for Molecular Radiation Oncology of Hunan Province, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410008, Hunan, China
- 4 National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Disorders, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410008, Hunan, China
Received: July 27, 2020 Accepted: December 19, 2020 Published: March 3, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202620How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Shen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
NLRP1 (NLR family, pyrin domain containing 1), the first NLR protein, described to form an inflammasome, plays critical roles in innate immunity and inflammation. However, NLRP1 has not been reported to be linked to LUAD (lung adenocarcinoma) risk, prognosis, immunotherapy or any other treatments. This research aimed to explore the prognostic value and mechanism of NLRP1 in LUAD. We performed bioinformatics analysis on LUAD data downloaded from TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) and GEO (Gene Expression Omnibus), and jointly analyzed with online databases such as TCGAportal, LinkedOmics, TIMER, ESTIMATE and TISIDB. NLRP1 expression of LUAD tissue was considerably lower than that in normal lung tissue. Decreased NLRP1 expression of LUAD was associated with relatively high pathological, T and N stages. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis indicated that patients with low NLRP1 expression had a worse prognosis than those with high expression. Multivariate Cox analysis further showed that NLRP1 expression level was an independent prognostic factor of LUAD. Moreover, the level of NLRP1 expression was positively linked to the degree of infiltration of various TIICs (tumor-infiltrating immune cells). Our findings confirmed that reduced expression of NLRP1 was significantly related to poor prognosis and low degree of immune cell infiltration in LUAD patients.
Abbreviations
NLRP1: NLR family, pyrin domain containing 1; LUAD: lung adenocarcinoma; TCGA: The Cancer Genome Atlas; GEO: Gene Expression Omnibus; GO_BP: Gene Ontology biological process; KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes; GSEA: Gene Set Enrichment Analysis; FDR: false discovery rate; TIMER: The Tumor IMmune Estimation Resource; ESTIMATE: The Estimation of STromal and Immune cells in MAlignant Tumor tissues using Expression data; OS: overall survival; TRU: terminal respiratory unit; PI: proximal inflammation; HR: hazard ratio.