LncRNA TUSC7 affects malignant tumor prognosis by regulating protein ubiquitination: a genome-wide analysis from 10,237 pan-cancer patients

Background: Recent studies have shown that tumor suppressor candidate 7 (TUSC7) is abnormally expressed and is associated with poor prognoses in patients with cancer. However, the clinical value and biological role of TUSC7 in cancers remain unclear. Methods: We performed a meta-analysis of 655 cancer patients from 9 selected articles in order to seek the correlation of TUSC7 expression levels and tumor size, lymph node metastasis, overall survival, and other clinical related indicators. The pan-cancer survival data in the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) were extracted and meta-analyzed to validate the results from our meta-analysis. Sixty thousand public Affymetrix microarrays data were downloaded and used to mine signal pathways associated with TUSC7. Results: Our results showed that TUSC7 is differentially expressed between cancerous and paracancerous tissues. TUSC7 had a protective effect in the prognosis of cancer, which was shown by the pan-cancer survival data meta-analysis. TUSC7 expression was not correlated with age, gender, tumor size, tumor differentiation, lymph node metastasis or TNM staging in the reported cancers. Pathway analysis revealed that TUSC7 is co-expressed with genes enriched in ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis. Conclusions: Our study suggested that decreased TUSC7 was associated with cancer prognosis in cancer patients via regulation of ubiquitination.