Research Paper|Volume 17, Issue 2|pp 588—606

Pan-cancer analysis of Methyltransferase-like 16 (METTL16) and validated in colorectal cancer

Ling Liu¹, Siying Wang¹, Xuyu Chen¹, Qian Luo¹, Zhaoxia Wang¹, Juan Li¹

¹Department of Oncology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210011, China

* Equal contribution

Received: May 10, 2024Accepted: December 11, 2024Published: February 27, 2025

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206210

Copyright: © 2025 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Human Methyltransferase-like 16(METTL16) is an independent N6-methyladenosine (m6A) methyltransferase. Previous studies have proven METTL16 been linked with some types of cancers. However, comparative studies of the relevance of METTL16 across diverse tumors remain sparse. We comprehensively investigated the effect of METTL16 expression on tumor prognosis across human malignancies by analyzing multiple cancer-related databases like Tumor Immune Estimation Resource (TIMER) and human protein atlas (HPA). Bioinformatics data indicated that METTL16 was overexpressed in most of these human malignancies and was significantly associated with the prognosis of patients with cancer, especially in colorectal cancer (CRC). Subsequently, In vitro experiments, the utility of METTL16 that downregulation of its expression could result in reduced proliferation and migration of CRC cells. Our findings reveal novel insights into METTL16 expression and its biological functions in diverse cancer types, indicating that METTL16 could serve as a prognostic biomarker and plays an important role in colorectal cancer.