Genome-wide bioinformatics analysis reveals CTCFL is upregulated in high-grade epithelial ovarian cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the most lethal gynecological malignancy that threatens the health of females. Previous studies have demonstrated that the survival outcomes of patients with different EOC grades varied. Therefore, the EOC grade is considered to serve as a distinctive prognostic factor. To date, the evaluation of ovarian cancer grade relies on pathological examination and a quantitative index for diagnosis is lacking. Furthermore, the dysregulation of genes has been demonstrated to exert pivotal functions in the carcinogenesis of EOCs. Therefore, the identification of effective biomarkers associated with EOC grade is of importance for the development of therapeutic regimens, and also contributes to the prediction of EOC prognosis. Microarrays have been increasingly applied for the identification of potential molecular biomarkers for numerous diseases including EOC. In the present study, four public microarray datasets (GSE26193, GSE63885, GSE30161 and GSE9891) were analyzed. A total of 6,103 upregulated probes corresponding to 5,766 genes, and 4,004 downregulated probes corresponding to 3,707 genes were identified in the GSE26193, GSE63885 and GSE30161 datasets. ALK and LTK ligand 2 was the most downregulated gene associated with the tumor grade, while CCCTC-binding factor like (CTCFL), EGF like domain multiple 6, radical S-adenosyl methionine domain containing 2 and SAM and HD domain containing deoxynucleoside triphosphate triphosphohydrolase 1 were the most upregulated genes associated with EOC grade. The GSE9891 dataset was added for further analysis. Only one probe (1552368_at) encoding for CTCFL was identified to be consistently upregulated in the four examined datasets. Immunohistochemical analysis was used to detect the expression of CTCFL between low- and high-grade EOC tissues and revealed that the EOC grade was closely associated with CTCFL level. This was corroborated via the reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction. Taken together, the results of the present study suggested that CTCFL is upregulated in high-grade epithelial ovarian cancer.