Background: The present study aims to explore the expression, clinical significance, and prospective pathway signaling of miR-501-3p in ovarian cancer (OC) based on database and informatics analysis.
Methods: Kruskal–Wallis test, Wilcoxon sign-rank test, and logistic regression were used to evaluate the relationship between clinical features and miR-501-3p expression. Kaplan–Meier survival curve analysis was used to explore the relationship between miR-501-3p expression and the prognosis of OC patients. The miRNA targets were obtained from databases TargetScan, miRanda, TarBase, miRTarBase, miR2Disease, miRecords, and miRWalk. GO and KEGG analyses were used to analyze the significant involvement of miR-501-3p target genes in function.
Results: The low miR-501-3p expression in OC was significantly associated with histologic grade (P=0.015). Low miR-501-3p expression predicted a poorer overall survival (HR: 0.77; 95% CI: 0.61– 0.96; P=0.02) and disease-specific survival (HR: 0.77; 95% CI: 0.61– 0.99; P=0.038). GO and KEGG analyses demonstrated that miR-501-3p might participate in the development of OC by pathways including one carbon pool by folate, protein digestion and absorption, cell cycle, kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus infection, and viral carcinogenesis.
Conclusions: Low miR-501-3p expression is significantly associated with poor survival in OC patients. It may be a promising prognostic biomarker for OC patients.
Keywords: microRNA-501-3p, ovarian cancer, prognosis, the cancer genome atlas, gene expression