Screening and identification of key biomarkers in alimentary tract cancers: A bioinformatic analysis

LETM1 (leucine zipper-EF-hand-containing transmembrane protein 1) silence reduces the proliferation, invasion, migration and angiogenesis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma via KIF14 (kinesin family member 14)

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC), a major form of esophageal cancer, is a serious threat to human health. This study was conducted to investigate the pathogenesis of ESCC and find effective therapies to improve it. Protein expression of transfected plasmids was detected by RT-qPCR and western blot. Co-immunoprecipitation assay was performed to verify the binding of LETM1 and KIF14. CCK-8, wound healing and transwell assays were used to assess the proliferation, invasion and migration of ESCC cells. Finally, the angiogenesis was assessed using tubule formation assay. The co-immunoprecipitation results showed that LETM1 could bind to KIF14. The cytological and protein results demonstrated that interference with LETM1 caused downregulation of KIF14 expression, which led to inhibition of proliferation, invasion, migration and angiogenesis in ESCC cells. Taken together, interfering with LETM1 to downregulate KIF14 may become a new target for ESCC treatment.

Prognostic Impact and Functional Annotations of KIF11 and KIF14 Expression in Patients with Colorectal Cancer

Genomic instability (GIN) has an important contribution to the pathology of colorectal cancer (CRC). Therefore, we selected mitosis and cytokinesis kinesins, KIF11 and KIF14, as factors of potential clinical and functional value in CRC, as their aberrant expression has been suspected to underlie GIN. We examined the expression and the prognostic and biological significance of KIF11 and KIF14 in CRC via in-house immunohistochemistry on tissue microarrays, public mRNA expression datasets, as well as bioinformatics tools. We found that KIF11 and KIF14 expression, at both the protein and mRNA level, was markedly altered in cancer tissues compared to respective controls, which was reflected in the clinical outcome of CRC patients. Specifically, we provide the first evidence that KIF11 protein and mRNA, KIF14 mRNA, as well as both proteins together, can significantly discriminate between CRC patients with better and worse overall survival independently of other relevant clinical risk factors. The negative prognostic factors for OS were high KIF11 protein, high KIF11 protein + low KIF14 protein, low KIF11 mRNA and low KIF14 mRNA. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that the gene sets related to the cell cycle, DNA replication, DNA repair and recombination, among others, were positively associated with KIF11 or KIF14 expression in CRC tissues. In TCGA cohort, the positive correlations between several measures related to GIN and the expression of KIFs were also demonstrated. In conclusion, our results suggest that CRC patients can be stratified into distinct risk categories by biological and molecular determinants, such as KIF11 and KIF14 expression and, mechanistically, this is likely attributable to their role in maintaining genome integrity.