The analysis of N6-methyladenosine regulators impacting the immune infiltration in clear cell renal cell carcinoma

• Published in: Medical oncology (Northwood, London, England) Vol. 39; no. 4; p. 41
• Main Authors: Li, Jianpeng, Cao, Jinlong, Liang, Cheng, Deng, Ran, Li, Pan, Tian, Junqiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.04.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Datasets; Hematology; Internal Medicine; Kidney cancer; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Oncology; Original Paper; Pathology; Survival analysis; m6A; Tumor immune microenvironment; ccRCC; HMGA2; IGF2BPs
• ISSN: 1357-0560; 1559-131X
• DOI: 10.1007/s12032-021-01645-0

The tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) and N6-methyladenosine (m6A) are related to the progression of several types of cancer. Nevertheless, the impact of m6A on the TIME of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) remains unclear. This study used an unsupervised clustering algorithm to divide the samples into distinct subgroups. The single sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA) algorithm to estimate the TIME. The correlation between m6A regulators and immune cells in different subgroups was calculated using Spearman analysis. At last, the relationship between IGF2BP2 and HMGA2 was validated in several datasets, including TCGA-KIRC, GEO, and HPA datasets. We found that m6A regulators were differently expressed in several clinical groups. Based on the expression of m6A regulators, we divided the samples into three subgroups. Then, the survival analysis for these three subgroups showed that the cluster 2 subgroup had poor overall survival (OS). Further, we found that IGF2BP2 and IGF2BP3 were essential components in the cluster 2 subgroup using the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm. In addition, the expression of these two genes was significantly correlated with survival time. At last, we found that HMGA2 was significantly correlated with IGF2BP2 in several datasets, which indicated that HMGA2 is an essential role in affecting IGF2BP2 regulating the TIME. There is a close correlation between m6A regulators and TIME. Moreover, IGF2BP2 is related to the progression of ccRCC and plays an essential role in affecting the TIME.