Comprehensive analysis of lower mitochondrial complex I expression is associated with cell metastasis of clear cell renal cell carcinoma

Background: Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is characterized by high metastasis potential. It is of great importance to explore the mechanisms underlying ccRCC metastasis and to enable development of potent therapeutics. The mitochondrial complex I (CI) had been considered to play an important role in the development of cancers, but less known in ccRCC. Methods: We utilized available public databases of ccRCC, including single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) data GSE73121 and The Cancer Genome Atlas-kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (TCGA-KIRC). Principal component analysis (PCA) and t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (tSNE) analysis were evaluated the heterogeneity of metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) and primary renal cell carcinoma (pRCC). Protein-protein interaction (PPI) network identified critical gene. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) and gene set variation analysis (GSVA) performed to explore the potential biologic pathways. Results: Our study revealed a significant gene expression heterogeneity between pRCC and mRCC. A PPI network based on differentially expressed genes (DEGs) identified electron transport chain (ETC), especially mitochondrial CI, as the key network hub. Further analysis revealed that the role of mitochondrial CI is associated with tumor metastasis and immune responds of ccRCC. Although CI had low frequency mutations in ccRCC, CI expression is associated with the high frequency mutated genes. A prognosis model included 7 CI genes, and these had a significant effect on overall survival (OS). The area under the curve at 1, 3, and 5 years was 0.717, 0.685, and 0.728, respectively. Transcription factor analysis predicted that PPARG possibly is a potential transcription activator of CI genes in ccRCC. Conclusions: Overall, we found that CI expression is associated with ccRCC progress. CI and PPARG may be potential biomarkers for metastatic ccRCC.