A Panel of Synapse-Related Genes as a Biomarker for Gliomas

Gliomas are the most common primary brain cancers. In recent years, IDH mutation and 1p/19q codeletion have been suggested as biomarkers for the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of gliomas. However, these biomarkers are only effective for a part of glioma patients, and thus more biomarkers are still emergently needed. Recently, an electrochemical communication between normal neurons and glioma cells by neuro-glioma synapse has been reported. Moreover, it was discovered that breast-to-brain metastasis tumor cells have pseudo synapses with neurons, and these synapses were indicated to promote tumor progression and metastasis. Based on the above observations, we first curated a panel of 17 synapse-related genes and then proposed a metric, synapse score to quantify the "stemness" for each sample of 12 glioma gene expression datasets from TCGA, CGGA, and GEO. Strikingly, synapse score showed excellent predictive ability for the prognosis, diagnosis, and grading of gliomas. Moreover, being compared with the two established biomarkers, IDH mutation and 1p/19q codeletion, synapse score demonstrated independent and better predictive performance. In conclusion, this study proposed a quantitative method, synapse score, as an efficient biomarker for monitoring gliomas.