Background: To investigate the expression of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) LINC00261 in colon cancer and its clinical significance.
Methods: The Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM) software was used to analyze the data of gene microarray GSE33113 which was downloaded from NCBI GEO Data Sets, and differential expression of lncRNA in colon cancer was screened. The expression of LINC00261 in 138 cases of colon cancer and its adjacent normal tissues were detected by in situ hybridization (ISH). Then, the correlation between LINC 00261 expression and clinico-pathological characteristics of colon cancer was analyzed, and Cox's proportional hazards regression model was used to assess the value of LINC00261 in predicting the prognosis of colon cancer patients after operation.
Results: Analysis of gene microarray GSE33113 data by SAM found 65 differentially expressed lncRNA in colon cancer, including 6 up-regulated lncRNA (fold change > 2) and 59 down-regulated lncRNA (fold change < 0.05). The results of in situ hybridization showed that the negative rates of LINC00261 in colon carcinoma tissues and their adjacent non-cancerous tissues were 63.77% (88/138) and 8.70% (12/115), respectively, with a significant difference between them (p < 0.01). LINC00261 was significantly correlated with the clinical staging of patients with colon cancer (p < 0.05). Lowered expression of LINC00261 was identified as an independent risk factor affecting postoperative recurrence-free survival time of the colon cancer patients (p < 0.001).
Conclusions: There was decreased expression of LINC00261 in colon cancer tissues, which was related to clinical stages, lymph node metastasis, and recurrence-free survival time of colon cancer, indicating that LINC00261 might be used as a new molecular biomarker for evaluating the metastasis and recurrence-free survival of colon cancer.