Expression and clinical significance of ENC1 in gastrointestinal tumors: Bioinformatics analysis based on a public gene database

BACKGROUND: To investigate the expression characteristics of ectodermal-neural cortex 1 (ENC1) in gastrointestinal tumors and its potential value in judging the prognosis of patient survival. METHODS: RNA sequence (RNA-seq) data and patient survival data related to stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD) and colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) in gastric cancer and colon cancer from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) were downloaded for expression difference analysis and Cox survival regression analysis. A Kaplan–Meier (KM) survival curve was plotted to analyze the tumor invasion level of patients with different ENC1 expression levels, and the main influencing pathways of ENC1 were analyzed by Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment analysis and protein network analysis. RESULTS: The data of 405 STAD samples and 494 COAD clinical samples of TCGA were analyzed, and it was found that the expression of ENC1 in tumor tissues of patients with both types of cancer was significantly higher than that in normal tissues, with Log(2) fold change values of 1.97 and 2.06, respectively, P<0.001. Cox analysis revealed that the high expression of ENC1 was not significantly correlated with the prognosis and survival time of patients with gastric cancer and patients with colon cancer: overall survival (OS) hazard ratio (HR): 1.039, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.890–1.213, P=0.627 for gastric cancer, OS HR: 0.886, 95% CI: 0.702–1.111, P=0.306 for colon cancer. KEGG pathway enrichment analysis of gene ENC1 revealed that ENC1 was mainly involved in neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction. The high expression of ENC1 was associated with various immune cells and different T cells such as basophils, CD4(+) memory T cells, CD4(+) TEM, and MV endothelial cells in gastric and colon cancers. The results of ENC1 protein interaction network analysis suggested that ENC1 may be involved in regulating neurite formation and neural crest cell differentiation. CONCLUSIONS: ENC1 expression is elevated in both gastric and colon cancers, and ENC1 is associated with various immune cells and different T cells such as basophils, CD4(+) memory T cells, CD4(+) TEM, and MV endothelial cells in both gastric and colon cancers, but ENC1 does not affect the survival and prognosis of patients.