Identification of 5-methylcytosine-related signature for predicting prognosis in ovarian cancer

BACKGROUND: Ovarian cancer is one of the most common malignancies often resulting in a poor prognosis. 5-methylcytosine (m5C) is a common epigenetic modification with roles in eukaryotes. However, the expression and function of m5C regulatory factors in ovarian cancer remained unclear. RESULTS: Two molecular subtypes with different prognostic and clinicopathological features were identified based on m5C regulatory factors. Meanwhile, functional annotation showed that in the two subtypes, 452 differentially expressed genes were significantly related to the malignant progression of ovarian cancer. Subsequently, four m5C genes were screened to construct a risk marker predictive of overall survival and indicative of clinicopathological features of ovarian cancer, also the robustness of the risk marker was verified in external dataset and internal validation set. multifactorial cox regression analysis and nomogram demonstrated that risk score was an independent prognostic factor for ovarian cancer prognosis. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, our results revealed that m5C-related genes play a critical role in tumor progression in ovarian cancer. Further detection of m5C methylation could provide a novel targeted therapy for treating ovarian cancer. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40659-021-00340-8.