Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 18 pp 22361—22374
Identification of clinical trait-related small RNA biomarkers with weighted gene co-expression network analysis for personalized medicine in endocervical adenocarcinoma
- 1 Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai 200011, China
- 2 Shanghai Key Laboratory of Female Reproductive Endocrine Related Diseases, Institute of Metabolism and Integrative Biology, Institutes of Biomedical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
- 3 State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering, MOE Key Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology, and Collaborative Innovation Center for Genetics and Development, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai 200438, China
Received: April 8, 2021 Accepted: August 31, 2021 Published: September 20, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203543How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Shi 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
Endocervical adenocarcinoma (EAC) is an aggressive type of endocervical cancer. At present, molecular research on EAC mainly focuses on the genome and mRNA transcriptome, the investigation of small RNAs in EAC has not been fully described. Here, we systematically explored small RNAs in 14 EAC patients with different subtypes using small RNA sequencing. MiRNAs and tRNA-derived RNAs (tDRs) accounted for the majority of mapped reads and the total number of miRNAs and tDRs maintained a relative balance. To explore the correlations between small RNAs expression and EAC with different clinical characteristics, we performed the weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) and screened for hub small RNAs. From the key modules, we identified 9 small RNAs that were significantly related to clinical characteristics in EAC patients. Gene ontology and pathway analyses revealed that these molecules were involved in the pathogenesis of EAC. Our work provided new insights into EAC pathogenesis and successfully identified several small RNAs as candidate biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis of EAC.