Development of alternative splicing signature in lung squamous cell carcinoma

Increasing evidence demonstrated that alternative splicing (AS) plays a vital role in tumorigenesis and clinical outcome of patient. However, systematical analysis of AS in lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) is lacking and greatly necessary. Thus, this study was to systematically estimate the function of AS events served as prognostic indicators in LUSC. Among 31,345 mRNA AS events in 9633 genes, we detected 1996 AS in 1409 genes which have significant connection with overall survival (OS) of LUSC patients. Then, prognostic model based on seven types of AS events was established and we further constructed a combined prognostic model. The Kaplan-Meier curve results suggested that seven types of AS signatures and the combined prognostic model could exhibit robust performance in predicting prognosis. Patients in the high-risk group had significantly shorter OS than those in the low-risk group. The ROC showed all prognostic models had high accuracy and powerful predictive performance with different AUC ranging from 0.837 to 0.978. Moreover, the combined prognostic model had highest performance in risk stratification and predictive accuracy than single prognostic models and had higher accuracy than other mRNA model. Finally, a significant correlation network between survival-related AS genes and prognostic splicing factors (SFs) was established. In conclusion, our study provided several potential prognostic AS models and constructed splicing network between AS and SFs in LUSC, which could be used as potential indicators and treatment targets for LUSC patients.