Increased CX3CL1 mRNA expression level is a positive prognostic factor in patients with lung adenocarcinoma

Chemokines are a family of small cytokines, which are signalling proteins secreted by cells. The principal role of chemokines is to serve as chemoattractants to guide the migration of their target cells. Chemokine C-X3-C motif ligand 1 (CX3CL1) is a protein-coding gene of fractalkine, which serves as a ligand for chemokine C-X3-C motif receptor 1 (CX3CR1) and integrins. However, the roles of CX3CL1 in different pathological types of lung cancer remain poorly understood. The present study aimed to investigate the potential clinical and biological function of CX3CL1 mRNA expression in patients with lung cancer. In the present study, lung cancer data obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus database and The Cancer Genome Atlas were downloaded and analysed, and the results demonstrated that an increased CX3CL1 mRNA expression in tumour tissues from lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) was associated with improved overall survival. However, no significant association was identified between CX3CL1 expression and the prognosis of lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC). Furthermore, the genes whose expression levels were correlated with CX3CL1 expression were subjected to enrichment analysis, and the results for the LUAD data demonstrated that the most significant biological processes included ‘positive regulation of cell adhesion’, ‘leukocyte cell-cell adhesion’, ‘leukocyte migration’ and ‘T cell activation’, whereas, the important highly ranked pathways included ‘cell adhesion molecules (CAMs)’, ‘leukocyte transendothelial migration’ and ‘natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity’. However, in the patients with LUSC, the genes that were highly correlated with CX3CL1 were not enriched for any biological processes or signalling pathways. Based on the data of the present study, it was hypothesised that CX3CL1 may serve as a prognostic marker for LUAD.