Identification of novel potential genes in testicular germ cell tumors: A transcriptome analysis

Testicular germ cell tumors (TGCTs), containing pure seminoma and non-seminoma, occupy the most majority of testicular cancers in adolescents and young men, which has increased dramatically in recent decades. Therefore, it is important to find crucial genes for improving diagnosis and prognosis in TGCTs. However, the diagnostic and prognostic markers of TGCTs are limited.

In this study, our main objective is to explore novel potential genes that can be used as diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in TGCTs. Our study detected 732 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) using three microarray expression profiling datasets from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). Multiple analysis was performed to identify the roles of DEGs, including pathway and functional enrichment analysis, protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis, module analysis, and survival analysis.

In total, 322 upregulated genes and 406 downregulated genes were identified as DEGs The functional and pathway enrichment analysis shows that DEGs were highly enriched in multiple biological attributes such as T cell activation, reproduction in multicellular organism, sperm flagellum, antigen processing and presentation Then, seven potential crucial genes were identified via PPI network analysis, module analysis, and survival analysis. Furthermore, 7 potential crucial genes had shown to play a key role in regulating immune cell infiltration level in patients with TGCTs.

We identified seven potential crucial genes (LAPTM5, NCF2, PECAM1, CD14, COL4A2, ANPEP and RGS1), which may be molecular markers in improving the way of diagnosis and prognosis in TGCTs.