Identification of prognostic alternative splicing events in sarcoma

Sarcoma is a rare malignancy with unfavorable prognoses. Accumulating evidence indicates that aberrant alternative splicing (AS) events are generally involved in cancer pathogenesis. The aim of this study was to identify the prognostic value of AS-related survival genes as potential biomarkers, and highlight the functional roles of AS events in sarcoma. RNA-sequencing and AS-event datasets were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) sarcoma cohort and TCGA SpliceSeq, respectively. Survival-related AS events were further assessed using a univariate analysis. A multivariate Cox regression analysis was also performed to establish a survival-gene signature to predict patient survival, and the area-under-the-curve method was used to evaluate prognostic reliability. KOBAS 3.0 and Cytoscape were used to functionally annotate AS-related genes and to assess their network interactions. We detected 9674 AS events in 40,184 genes from 236 sarcoma samples, and the 15 most significant genes were then used to construct a survival regression model. We further validated the involvement of ten potential survival-related genes (TUBB3, TRIM69, ZNFX1, VAV1, KCNN2, VGLL3, AK7, ARMC4, LRRC1, and CRIP1) in the occurrence and development of sarcoma. Multivariate survival model analyses were also performed, and validated that a model using these ten genes provided good classifications for predicting patient outcomes. The present study has increased our understanding of AS events in sarcoma, and the gene-based model using AS-related events may serve as a potential predictor to determine the survival of sarcoma patients.