Comprehensive Pan-Cancer Analysis Reveals RNF20 as a Candidate Prognostic and Diagnostic Biomarker

RNF20 is a RING-domain E3 ubiquitin ligase that mediates monoubiquitination of histone H2B at lysine 120 and plays important roles in transcriptional elongation, repair of DNA double-strand breakages, chromatin homeostasis as well as tumor suppression. Even though RNF20 has been investigated in some cancer types, its global biological functions and other related mechanisms in diverse cancers are yet to be fully understood. To investigate the systematical evaluation of the pan-cancer expression pattern of RNF20 and its potential to serve as a diagnostic and prognostic biomarker, we first pulled together the information of several publicly available databases and bioinformatics tools. We compared association between RNF20 expression and important clinical and molecular variables-including clinical survival outcomes, immunomodulatory molecular, tumor stemness index, prognostic use, immunomodulatory molecular, genomic and immunological variables, immunotherapy response, response to chemotherapeutic agents, and functional enrichment profiles. The levels of RNF20 were also substantially greater in tumor tissues relative to identical non-tumor tissues; furthermore, the high levels of RNF20 in some cancer tissues are associated with the good prognostic outcome. The subsequent studies demonstrated that RNF20 is highly correlated with the immune checkpoint molecules, immunomodulatory genes, prognostic biomarkers, tumor stemness scores, as well as immune cell infiltration in various tumors. The SN-38 and talazoparib were identified as possible RNF20-targeting agents through drug susceptibility analysis. It was revealed that missense mutations are most frequent type of variations, which is revealed by functional enrichment analysis, mutation profiling, RNA modification mapping and analysis of genomic heterogeneity of the RNF20 related genes within the framework of glioblastoma, glioma, low-grade glioma in addition to thyroid cancer. Collectively, these results support the exculpatory role of RNF20 in the treatment of different types of cancer, which could help to certify the usage of this biological molecule as a predictive biomarker of treatment response.