mRNA expression of the XAGE-1 gene in human acute leukemia

Prediction and analysis of essential genes using the enrichments of gene ontology and KEGG pathways

Identifying essential genes in a given organism is important for research on their fundamental roles in organism survival. Furthermore, if possible, uncovering the links between core functions or pathways with these essential genes will further help us obtain deep insight into the key roles of these genes. In this study, we investigated the essential and non-essential genes reported in a previous study and extracted gene ontology (GO) terms and biological pathways that are important for the determination of essential genes. Through the enrichment theory of GO and KEGG pathways, we encoded each essential/non-essential gene into a vector in which each component represented the relationship between the gene and one GO term or KEGG pathway. To analyze these relationships, the maximum relevance minimum redundancy (mRMR) was adopted. Then, the incremental feature selection (IFS) and support vector machine (SVM) were employed to extract important GO terms and KEGG pathways. A prediction model was built simultaneously using the extracted GO terms and KEGG pathways, which yielded nearly perfect performance, with a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.951, for distinguishing essential and non-essential genes. To fully investigate the key factors influencing the fundamental roles of essential genes, the 21 most important GO terms and three KEGG pathways were analyzed in detail. In addition, several genes was provided in this study, which were predicted to be essential genes by our prediction model. We suggest that this study provides more functional and pathway information on the essential genes and provides a new way to investigate related problems.

Preliminary study on XAGE-1b gene and its mechanism for promoting tumor cell growth

The XAGE-1b gene has been identified in numerous malignancies in the human body. However, little is known regarding its mechanism for promoting tumorigenesis in adenoid cystic carcinoma. The aim of this study was to explore the correlation between tumor cell growth and the XAGE-1b gene. The constructed PCMV-Myc plasmid vector containing the XAGE-1b gene and transfected adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC)-2 cells was applied to study cell cycle alterations and anti-apoptotic effects. These were assessed by flow cytometry with PI staining and the measurement of cell content at its Sub-G₁ phase, respectively. The fluorescence intensity representing the regulation of XAGE-1b on the transcription factors located downstream of the signaling pathway using the Mercury pathway profiling system was also detected. XAGE-1b over expression promoted cell growth by shortening G₀-G₁ and prolonging the G₂-M phase. Additionally, XAGE-1b overexpression enhanced the anti-apoptotic effects induced by tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and serum deprivation in ACC-2 cells. The results of the present study suggested that XAGE-1b gene is crucial in the tumorigenesis of ACC, and its mechanism should be further investigated.