Increased expression of TET3 predicts unfavorable prognosis in patients with ovarian cancer-a bioinformatics integrative analysis

Ovarian carcinoma is a lethal gynecological malignancy. Women with ovarian cancer (OC) are highly recurrent and typically diagnosed at late stage. Ten-eleven translocation protein 3 (TET3) belongs to the family of ten-eleven translocations (TETs) which induce DNA demethylation and gene regulation in epigenetic level by converting 5-methylcytosine (5mC) to 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC). Previous studies indicated that TET3 is overexpressed in ovarian cancer tissues. However, the clinic-pathological functions and prognostic values of TET3 remain unclear. Here we performed an integrative study to identify the role of TET3 by bioinformatics analysis. The TET3 expression in ovarian cancer was assessed with Oncomine database, and validated with TCGA and GTEx database. The correlation of TET3 gene alteration and clinic-pathological functions was addressed by integrative analysis of GEO datasets. Then we showed mainly TET3 gain and diploid but less deletion in ovarian cancer by copy number alteration (CNA) or mutation analysis with cBioPortal. Furthermore, by using Kaplan-Meier plotter (K-M plotter), we evaluated that high TET3 level was associated with poor survival in ovarian cancer patients, which was validated with analysis by PrognoScan database and gene differential analyses with TCGA and GTEx. This is the first study demonstrated that elevated expression of TET3 is associated with poor clinic-pathological functions, poor prognosis, wherein TET3, which presents epigenetic changes or methylation changes, might be served as a diagnostic marker or therapeutic target for ovarian cancer.