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Updated: Jun 13, 2025

Isolation of Proximal Fluids to Investigate the Tumor Microenvironment of Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma
Published on: November 5, 2020
Liquid-liquid phase separation-related genes associated with prognosis, tumor microenvironment characteristics, and
Xiao-Hui Wu1,2, Xu-Yun Huang1,2, Qi You1,2
1Department of Urology, Urology Research Institute, the First Affiliated Hospital, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, 350005, China.
Objective:
This study aimed to explore the Liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS)-related genes associated with the prognosis of bladder cancer (BCa) and assess the potential application of LLPS-related prognostic signature for predicting prognosis in BCa patients.
Methods:
Clinical information and transcriptome data of BCa patients were extracted from the Cancer Genome Atlas-BLCA (TCGA-BLCA) database and the GSE13507 database. Furthermore, 108 BCa patients who received treatment at our institution were subjected to a retrospective analysis. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) analysis was performed to develop an LLPS-related prognostic signature for BCa. The CCK8, wound healing and Transwell assays were performed.
Results:
Based on 62 differentially expressed LLPS-related genes (DELRGs), three DELRGs were screened by LASSO analysis including kallikrein-related peptidase 5 (KLK5), monoacylglycerol O-acyltransferase 2 (MOGAT2) and S100 calcium-binding protein A7 (S100A7). Based on three DELRGs, a novel LLPS-related prognostic signature was constructed for individualized prognosis assessment. Kaplan-Meier curve analyses showed that LLPS-related prognostic signature was significantly correlated with overall survival (OS) of BCa. ROC analyses demonstrated the LLPS-related prognostic signature performed well in predicting the prognosis of BCa patients in the training group (the area under the curve (AUC) = 0.733), which was externally verified in the validation cohort 1 (AUC = 0.794) and validation cohort 2 (AUC = 0.766). Further experiments demonstrated that inhibiting KLK5 could affect the proliferation, migration, and invasion of BCa cells.
Conclusions:
In this study, a novel LLPS-related prognostic signature was successfully developed and validated, demonstrating strong performance in predicting the prognosis of BCa patients.
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