Comprehensive Expression and Prognosis Analyses of ITGB1 in AML

BackgroundAcute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a dangerous type of leukemia. The emergence of multidrug resistance (MDR) and recurrence limits the prognosis and survival of patients. In recent studies, we have known that the bone marrow microenvironment was closely related to the poor prognosis of AML. However, the underlying mechanisms are still far from fully understood. By utilizing the bioinformatics analysis, we screened out integrin β1 (ITGB1) as the hub gene, which is associated with the bone marrow microenvironment mediated changes of AML cells, with expression profile GSE73157 downloaded from National Center for Biotechnology Information-Gene Expression Omnibus (NCBI-GEO) database.MethodsR studio software was used to screen out candidate hub genes and further visualize the differential expression. R package “limma” was to find out differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway were conducted by R package “cluster Profiler”. Furthermore, protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was also performed by online tool STRING and software Cytoscape. Last but not least, online tool PrognoScan and GEPIA was utilized for the evaluation of clinical significance of the selected hub gene. P and Cox p value <0.05 was considered to be statistical significance.ResultsITGB1 was filtrated as the only hub gene in this profile. We found that patients with high expression of ITGB1 had significantly longer overall survival (OS) than those with low expression (COX p value= 0.016730). Besides, the expression of the ITGB1 gene in AML patients is lower than that in normal people significantly (p value<0.01).ConclusionWe identified ITGB1 as a key gene in the bone marrow microenvironment mediated poor prognosis in AML. The down-regulated expression of ITGB1 was related to AML patients’ poor outcome. ITGB1 may be a potential marker for predicting and guiding AML treatment.