Yield of p53 expression in esophageal squamous cell cancer and its relationship with survival

Oxidative stress genes in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: construction of a novel prognostic signature and characterization of tumor microenvironment infiltration

Background

Oxidative stress plays an important role in the progression of various types of tumors. However, its role in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) has seldom been explored. This study aimed to discover prognostic markers associated with oxidative stress in ESCC to improve the prediction of prognosis and help in the selection of effective immunotherapy for patients.

Results

A consensus cluster was constructed using 14 prognostic differentially expressed oxidative stress-related genes (DEOSGs) that were remarkably related to the prognosis of patients with ESCC. The infiltration levels of neutrophils, plasma cells, and activated mast cells, along with immune score, stromal score, and estimated score, were higher in cluster 1 than in cluster 2. A prognostic signature based on 10 prognostic DEOSGs was devised that could evaluate the prognosis of patients with ESCC. Calculated risk score proved to be an independent clinical prognostic factor in the training, testing, and entire sets. P53 signaling pathway was highly enriched in the high-risk group. The calculated risk score was positively related to the infiltration levels of resting mast cells, memory B cells, and activated natural killer (NK) cells and negatively associated with the infiltration levels of M1 and M2 macrophages. The relationship between clinical characteristics and risk score has not been certified. The half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) values for sorafenib and gefitinib were lower for patients in the low-risk group.

Conclusion

Our prognostic signature based on 10 prognostic DEOSGs could predict the disease outcomes of patients with ESCC and had strong clinical value. Our study improves the understanding of oxidative stress in tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) and provides insights for developing improved and efficient immunotherapy strategies.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-022-04956-9.

High Expression of MDM2 and the p53 Protein is Predictive Biomarkers for Poor Prognosis of Oesophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Background and Objective

In the present study, we detected the expression of MDM2 and p53 in oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) specimens, studied their relationship with the survival of OSCC patients, and explored the potential of MDM2 and p53 to serve as predictive OSCC tumour markers.

Patients and Methods

Through immunohistochemistry and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), we detected the expression of MDM2 and the p53 protein in 157 OSCC specimens that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. After scoring the results, Pearson’s chi-square test and Cox regression were used for analysis.

Results

The results showed that the rates of high MDM2 and p53 expression in OSCC tissues were 60.5% and 51.0%, respectively. The expression levels of MDM2 and p53 in OSCC were significantly positively correlated (p<0.001, r=0.414). In addition, the pathological metastasis (M) status and MDM2 protein expression in OSCC were significantly correlated (p=0.027), and high expression of the p53 protein was positively correlated with OSCC transfer (p=0.005), pathological node status (p=0.008), and clinical stage (p=0.003). Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that the high expression of MDM2 and p53 was significantly related to the poor prognosis of OSCC. Moreover, subgroup analysis of the TNM staging of OSCC patients showed that the high expression of MDM2 and p53 was significantly correlated with poor OS and DFS of OSCC patients in either stage I–II or III–IV patients. Both univariate and Cox multivariate analyses showed that p53 and MDM2 can be used as independent factors for the prognosis of OSCC patients. Finally, our FISH detection results for MDM2 showed that the high expression of MDM2 was significantly correlated with the amplification of MDM2 (p=0.015).

Conclusion

This study shows that MDM2 and p53 can be used as independent predictors of the prognosis of patients with oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma.

Function Analysis of Human Protein Interactions Based on a Novel Minimal Loop Algorithm

Background:

Various properties of Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) network have been widely exploited to discover the topological organizing principle and the crucial function motifs involving specific biological pathway or disease process. The current motifs of PPI network are either detected by the topology-based coarse grain algorithms, i.e. community discovering, or depended on the limited-accessible protein annotation data derived precise algorithms. However, the identified network motifs are hardly compatible with the well-defined biological functions according to those two types of methods.

Method:

In this paper, we proposed a minimal protein loop finding method to explore the elementary structural motifs of human PPI network. Initially, an improved article exchange model was designed to search all the independent shortest protein loops of PPI network. Furthermore, Gene Ontology (GO) based function clustering analysis was implemented to identify the biological functions of the shortest protein loops. Additionally, the disease process associated shortest protein loops were considered as the potential drug targets. </P><P> Result: Our proposed method presents the lowest computational complexity and the highest functional consistency, compared to the three other methods. The functional enrichment and clustering analysis for the identified minimal protein loops revealed the high correlation between the protein loops and the corresponding biological functions, particularly, statistical analysis presenting the protein loops with the length less than 4 is closely connected with some disease process, suggesting the potential drug target.

Conclusion:

Our minimal protein loop method provides a novel manner to precisely define the functional motif of PPI network, which extends the current knowledge about the cooperating mechanisms and topological properties of protein modules composed of the short loops.

Prognostic value of SOX2, Cyclin D1, P53, and ki-67 in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

In this study, we evaluated SOX2, Cyclin D1, p53, and ki-67 expression immunohistochemically in 117 samples of surgically resected esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and matched normal tumor adjacent tissues and correlated the expression with clinicopathological finding and patient survival. Lymph node metastasis was observed in 36.8% of patients, and organ metastasis was observed in 17.9%. We detected high expression of SOX2, Cyclin D1, p53, and ki-67 in 46.1%, 70.1%, 54.7%, and 32.5% of ESCC tissues, respectively. SOX2 is localized in the tumor cell nuclei, and its expression was significantly associated with N stage (p=0.034) and differentiation (p=0.003) and ki-67 expression (p=0.001), whereas increased Cyclin D1 expression was correlated with high p53 (p=0.015). With regard to survival, we found that ESCC patients with high SOX2 expression had significantly better survival time than those with low SOX2 expression (p=0.021). A multivariate Cox analysis revealed that therapy and high p53 expression and venous invasion were independent predictors of unfavorable prognosis in overall survival (p=0.039, p=0.004, and p=0.023, respectively). Furthermore, higher T stage, clinical stage (pTNM), venous invasion, and high p53 expression were independent predictors of a worse progression-free survival. Notably, co-overexpression of p53 and Cyclin D1 was significantly correlated with poor overall survival and progression-free survival (p=0.029 and p=0.0227, respectively). Therefore, SOX2 might be considered as a potential prognostic indicator and a potential target for therapeutic targets in ESCC. p53 staining and combined p53 and Cyclin D1 expression had significantly unfavorable prognostic value for patients with ESCC. These findings provide more insight into ESCC; thus, further investigations into molecular mechanisms of drug resistance are essential.