Identification of the potential biomarkers in patients with glioma: a weighted gene co-expression network analysis

Glioma is the most common brain tumor with high mortality. However, there are still challenges for the timely and accurate diagnosis and effective treatment of the tumor. One hundred and twenty-one samples with grades II, III and IV from the Gene Expression Omnibus database were used to construct gene co-expression networks to identify hub modules closely related to glioma grade, and performed pathway enrichment analysis on genes from significant modules. In gene co-expression network constructed by 2345 differentially expressed genes from 121 gene expression profiles for glioma, we identified the black and blue modules that associated with grading. The module preservation analysis based on 118 samples indicates that the two modules were replicable. Enrichment analysis showed that the extracellular matrix genes were enriched for blue module, while cell division genes were enriched for black module. According to survival analysis, 21 hub genes were significantly up-regulated and one gene was significantly down-regulated. What’s more, IKBIP, SEC24D, and FAM46A are the genes with little attention among the 22 hub genes. In this study, IKBIP, SEC24D, and FAM46A related to glioma were mentioned for the first time to the current knowledge, which might provide a new idea for us to study the disease in the future. IKBIP, SEC24D and FAM46A among the 22 hub genes identified that are related to the malignancy degree of glioma might be used as new biomarkers to improve the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of glioma.