Characterization of the GATA Transcription Factor Family and Exploration of Their Relevance to Immune Infiltration and Tumor Microenvironment in Pancreatic Cancer

BACKGROUND: Pancreatic cancer (PC) presents a phenomenal disease burden worldwide. The GATA transcription factor family is associated with a variety of human malignancies. However, the relation between GATA family members (GATAs) and PC has not been elucidated. METHODS: This study integrates large-scale bioinformatics database resources to analyze the expression patterns of GATAs in PC patients and explore their underlying function mechanism and relevance to immune infiltration and other different cell types in the tumor microenvironment in pancreatic cancer. First, the expression pattern of GATAs in pancreatic cancer was detected by the Oncomine database and the Gene Expression Profile Interaction Analysis (GEPIA2) database and verified through other datasets in the R2 platform. Then, we used the cBioPortal database and the Human Protein Atlas to assess the correlation between GATAs and clinicopathological features of PC. Then, survival analyses were performed to identify candidate prognostic factors in the GATA family in PC patients. Further, we performed gene ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment analysis, protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, immune-infiltration correlation analysis, and cell type analysis of the tumor microenvironment at the single-cell level to explain the function of GATAs in pancreatic cancer. RESULTS: We found that GATA3 and GATA6 were highly expressed in pancreatic cancer, and the expression levels of GATA4 and GATA6 correlated with the pathological stage, differentiation grade, and molecular subtype of pancreatic cancer. The survival analysis revealed that lower GATA4 of PC patients was associated with better outcomes, and higher GATA6 might be associated with longer OS. In addition, GATA3 was associated with immune cell infiltration of PC, and GATA6 was mainly distributed in the epithelial cells with ductal phenotype. CONCLUSION: This work tentatively identified GATA3, GATA4, and GATA6 in the GATA family associated with pancreatic cancer. GATA4 may serve as a prognostic factor for PC patients, and GATA6 may act as a subtype marker for PC. In addition, GATA3 may reflect the immune-infiltration status of PC.