Identification of Low Expression of GSN as a Key Prognosis Gene in Patients with Gastric Carcinoma

Abstract

Gelsolin (GSN) is an important actin-binding protein. The current studyidentified the potential role of GSN in Gastric cancer (GC) tumorigenesis and prognosis using bioinformatic analysis. The TCGA, GTEx, and GEO databases were used to gain clinicopathological data on GC patients. Expression of GSN across cancers was evaluated. Kaplan–Meier analyses were conducted to evaluatethe prognostic value of GSN, while the association between GSN expression and clinical characteristics in gastric carcinoma was evaluated using the UALCAN database. The potential diagnostic value of GSN was assessed by the construction of ROC curves. The putative underlying cellular mechanisms were investigated by GO and KEGG pathway enrichment analyses. The GSN mRNA was validated by RT-qPCR. GSN mRNA and protein expression were lower in gastric carcinoma tissue than in noncancerous tissue. GO and KEGG enrichment analyses revealed that GSN plays a key regulatory role in actin binding and capping and thec-erbB/EGFR and PI3K/Akt signaling pathways. GSN has a high diagnostic significance, and low GSN expression is associated with shorter overall survival (OS) in gastric carcinoma. GSN expression was a risk factor for the progression-free interval in patients with gastric carcinoma. We observed that the OS rate of patients with higher GSN expression levels was longer, and GSN had significant predictive value for the clinical outcome of GC. GSN expression is involved in the tumorigenesis of gastric carcinoma progression and may regard as a putative diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for gastric carcinoma.