Abstract
Objective
Ovarian cancer (OC) affects nearly 22,000 women annually in the United States and ranks fifth in cancer deaths, largely because of being diagnosed at an advanced stage. Autophagy is the cellular process of self-degrading damaged or degenerate proteins and organelles. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a group of RNA molecules whose transcripts are greater than 200 nt but are not translated into proteins. However, just a small number of autophagy-related lncRNAs have been explored in depth.
Methods
We used RNA sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and autophagy datasets to identify dysfunctional autophagy-related lncRNAs and provide potential useful biomarkers for OC diagnosis and prognosis.
Results
Seventeen differentially expressed lncRNAs (AC010186.3, AC006001.2, LBX2-AS1, SNHG17, AC011445.1, AC083880.1, MIR193BHG, AC025259.3, HCG14, AC007114.1, AC108673.2, USP30-AS1, AC010336.5, LINC01132, AC006333.2, LINC00665 and AC027348.1) were selected as independent prognostic factors for OC patients. Functional annotation of the data was performed through gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA). The results suggested that the high-risk group was mainly enriched in specific tumor-related and metabolism pathways.
Conclusion
Based on the online databases, we identified novel autophagy-related lncRNAs for the prognosis of ovarian cancer.
Introduction
Ovarian cancer (OC) affects nearly 22,000 women annually in the United States and ranks fifth in cancer deaths, largely because of being diagnosed at an advanced stage. 1 Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) constitutes about 90% of all ovarian cancer cases. 2 Despite recent advances in cyto‐reductive surgery and chemotherapy, the 5‐year survival rate of EOC patients is only 30% and the prognosis of EOC remains poor. If effective early detection is possible, the survival rate can usually be increased to 70%. 3 The leading cause of death in these patients was extensive peritoneal metastasis, but the specific molecular mechanism controlling this remains unclear. 4 Several aspects affect the progression of the disease, including important epigenetic and genetic factors. Therefore, finding effective biomarkers is necessary for the diagnosis and treatment of OC patients.
Autophagy is the process of self-degradation of damaged or degraded proteins and organelles. Autophagy is thought to be related to malignant tumors, 5 neurodegenerative diseases, 6 immune diseases, 7 infection, 8 aging 9 and other diseases. Especially in tumors, autophagy plays different roles. Under physiological conditions, autophagy can prevent the accumulation of damaged substances and inhibit tumorigenesis. However, once a tumor is formed, autophagy can promote tumor growth, invasion and metastasis in some cases. 10 , 11 There is increasing evidence that autophagy-mediated cell survival plays a key role in the etiology and progression of OC.
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a group of RNA molecules whose transcripts are greater than 200 nt but are not translated into proteins. LncRNAs can impact the expression levels of genes, and also participate in various biological regulatory processes. Therefore, they are closely related to the occurrence, development and metastasis of tumors.12,13 In addition, lncRNAs have multiple functions involving chromatin organization and post-transcriptional regulation, and occupy about 4% to 9% of the human genome.14,15 A recent study found that lncRNA taurine up-regulated 1 (TUG1), via targeting miR-29b-3p, induces autophagy and consequently leads to paclitaxel resistance in OC. 16 Similarly, lncRNA RP11-135L22 was expressed at low levels in OC, related to TMN stage and tumor size, and also inhibited cisplatin-induced autophagy. 17 However, just a small number of autophagy-related lncRNAs have been explored in depth. Additionally, there is no comprehensive way to systematically evaluate autophagy-related lncRNAs and predict overall survival (OS) in OC patients. Thus, we used RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and autophagy datasets to display dysfunctional lncRNA microenvironments, understand their potential molecular function and clinical significance, and provide potential useful biomarkers for OC prognosis. In this report, we have identified prognostic autophagy-related lncRNAs and built a prognostic prediction model for OC patients.
Materials and methods
Data gathering
Gene expression information was obtained and downloaded from Genotype Tissue Expression (GTEx) projects and TCGA via the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) database.
18
Ensembl BioMart was applied to gain the mapping between each gene symbol and Ensembl transcript ID. The collected clinical pathological data included gender, age, stage, TMN classification, survival status and number of days of survival. The list of autophagy-related genes obtained from the Human Autophagy Database
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(HADb), a web-based resource, provided a comprehensive and up-to-date list of human genes and proteins related to autophagy. HADb included 232 autophagy-related genes. Pearson correlation was used to calculate the correlations between the autophagy-related genes and lncRNAs. A lncRNA was considered autophagy-related if it had a correlation coefficient |
KEGG and GO enrichment analyses
The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) is a resource for exploring high-level gene functions and associating genomic data from large-scale molecular datasets. Gene ontology (GO) functional analysis (biological processes (BP), cellular components (CC) and molecular functions (MF)) is a powerful bioinformatics tool to analyze biological processes and annotate genes. To explore the function of the identified 232 autophagy-related genes, biological analyses were carried out using GO and KEGG pathway analysis via the R language ggplot2 package to generate figures.
Building the prognostic autophagy-related lncRNA signature
After normalizing the mRNA expression profiles through edgerR (R package), false discovery rate (FDR)<0.05 and |log2FC|≥1 were determined as differentially expressed autophagy-related genes. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were used to assess the prognostic worth of autophagy-related lncRNAs in the training cohort. LncRNA levels that were significant in both univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis were chosen as autophagy-related lncRNAs. The prognostic signature as a risk score = (Coefficient lncRNA1 × expression of lncRNA1) + (Coefficient lncRNA2 × expression of lncRNA2) + ⋯ + (Coefficient lncRNAn × expression lncRNAn). A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was plotted to predict the accuracy of the prognostic signatures for OC patients.
Enrichment analysis of prognostic autophagy-related lncRNAs
Cytoscape was used to visualize the interaction network between lncRNAs and genes. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was applied to elucidate gene expression data. GSEA can determine whether a predefined set of genes can show significant differences in consistency between two biological states.
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We confirmed if the genes that were differentially expressed among the two groups were enriched in autophagy. A two-sided
Results
KEGG and GO enrichment analyses
We first performed functional enrichment analysis of these 232 autophagy-related genes. GO analysis results suggested that changes in biological processes were significantly enriched in regulation of autophagy, cellular response to protein, macroautophagy and cellular response to external stimulus. Changes in cellular components were mainly enriched in the membrane region, membrane raft and membrane microdomain. Changes in molecular functions were mainly enriched in ubiquitin protein ligase binding, protein binding and kinase activity. KEGG pathway analysis suggested enrichment mainly in carcinoma, virus infection, NOD-like receptor/FoxO/PI3K-Akt signaling pathway, and platinum drug resistance. These results are shown in Figure 1, and may provide important information for the further related functional analysis of autophagy-related genes.

Functional enrichment analysis of 232 autophagy-related genes. (a) Biological processes, (b) cellular components, (c) molecular functions and (d) Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG).
Prognostic autophagy-related lncRNAs in OC
According to the screening criteria, we identified 992 autophagy-related lncRNAs. LncRNA protein kinase C theta antisense RNA 1 (PRKCQ-AS1) had the largest correlation coefficient and the target gene was
Survival results and multivariate examination
We next analyzed the effect of these 17 lncRNAs on patient survival through Kaplan–Meier curves. The results demonstrated that all 17 lncRNAs significantly affected patient OS (Figures 2-3). As shown in Figure 4a, the Kaplan–Meier curves of the OC cohorts suggest the predictive OS value of the signature based on these 17 lncRNAs. Patients with high risk have poorer survival compared with the low-risk group (

Survival results and multivariate analysis. (a) Survival results, (b) risk survival status plot and (c) receiver operating characteristic (ROC) results.

Kaplan–Meier curve results demonstrated that long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) expression significantly affects ovarian cancer patient overall survival.

Kaplan–Meier curve results demonstrated that long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) expression significantly affects ovarian cancer patient overall survival.
Gene set enrichment analysis
Cytoscape was used to explore the potential link between the lncRNAs and target genes. As shown in Figure 5, AC083880.1 was the largest node in the network, while LINC01132, ladybird homeobox 2 antisense RNA 1 (LBX2-AS1), small nucleolar RNA host gene 17 (SNHG17), AC006001.2 and AC108673.2 had the smallest matched target genes. Functional annotation was performed through GSEA. The results suggested that the high-risk group was mainly enriched in cancer-related and metabolism-related pathways. Cancer-related pathways mainly involved regulation of the mammalian target of rapamycin (MTOR), peroxisome proliferator activated receptor (PPAR), and receptor tyrosine kinase (ERBB) signaling pathways (Figure 6). Metabolism-related pathways mainly involved amino sugar and nucleotide sugar metabolism, purine metabolism, fructose and mannose metabolism, inositol phosphate metabolism and arachidonic acid metabolism Figure 7. Overall, these results provide useful information for signaling pathway analysis regarding autophagy-related lncRNAs.

Cytoscape was used to explore the potential link between long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and target genes.

Functional annotation was performed using gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) for tumor-related pathways.

Functional annotation was performed using gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) for metabolism-related pathways.
Discussion
Exploring the molecular mechanisms related to OC pathogenesis has important clinical significance for the early diagnosis, treatment and improvement of prognosis of OC. LncRNAs play a role in the promotion or inhibition of tumor growth, invasion and metastasis through a variety of molecular mechanisms. Many lncRNAs are involved in the regulation of autophagy and affect cell signaling pathways related to autophagy. 21 Therefore, understanding the basic mechanism of autophagy-related lncRNA regulation may provide useful insights for the development of novel cancer treatments. In this study, we used an online dataset to determine a new and effective autophagy-related lncRNA signature for OC prognosis. Our signature may affect the autophagy-related lncRNA status of OC patients and provide potential biomarkers for clinical therapeutic intervention.
In our study, we performed a comprehensive analysis of autophagy-related lncRNAs, and also obtained OC clinical data from TCGA. First, we identified 17 autophagy-related lncRNAs, and the GSEA results suggested that the differentially expressed lncRNAs were mainly enriched in cancer-related and metabolism-related pathways. Because tumor cells mainly obtain energy for growth through glycolysis, inhibiting glycolysis can reduce colonization and kill tumor cells. 22 Glycolytic rate-limiting enzymes and hypoxia-inducible factors are expected to become new targets for cancer treatment. 23 Therefore, we hypothesize that these target lncRNAs may play an indispensable role in cancer metabolic pathways, and our analysis may provide potential useful biomarkers for cancer treatment.
Among the 17 autophagy-related lncRNAs, high expression of AC006001.2, AC010186.3, SNHG17, AC011445.1, AC025259.3, LBX2-AS1 and MIR193BHG were associated with the high-risk group, and AC083880.1, HCG14, AC007114.1, AC108673.2, USP30-AS1, AC010336.5, LINC01132, AC006333.2, LINC00665 and AC027348.1 were associated with the low-risk group. A recent study reported that lncRNA SNHG17 acts as a competing endogenous RNA with respect to regulating
Though it has been previously established that autophagy plays a critical role in OC, autophagy-related lncRNAs that affect gene expression is still unclear. In this study, our goal was to integrate lncRNA biomarkers into the current procedure for assessing the prognosis of treatment effects. Our study can help identify novel biomarkers and precise medical targets for OC. Additionally, our study can help with prognosis prediction, diagnosis and treatment strategies for OC patients. However, our approach needs to be performed in further independent cohorts and the predictive autophagy-related lncRNAs functionally confirmed by experiments. The limitations of our research include that our outcomes have not been validated in clinical samples and that our work utilized a relatively small number of patients. Although our research aims to establish a prognostic prediction model for OC, it is still in its infancy and requires further optimization.
Conclusion
Using the TCGA database and other bioinformatics methods, we have identified prognostic autophagy-related lncRNAs and were able to build a prognostic prediction model for OC patients. This model may assist us with identifying novel biomarkers and predicting prognosis, clinical diagnosis and management for OC patients.
Footnotes
Availability of data and materials
Author contributions
C.M. designed the research study and analyzed the data. J.Q.Z. wrote and revised the manuscript. Y.S.L. collected the data. All authors have read and approved the manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
