DNA methylation-regulated SNX20 overexpression correlates with poor prognosis, immune cell infiltration, and low-grade glioma progression

We revealed that SNX20 was up-regulated in LGG, and its higher expression was associated with adverse clinical outcomes and poor clinical characteristics, including WHO grade, IDH mutation, 1p/19q codeletion, and primary therapy outcome. The results of the Cox regression analysis revealed that SNX20 was an independent factor for the prognosis of low-grade glioma. Meanwhile, we also established a nomogram based on SNX20 to predict the 1-, 3-, or 5-year survival in LGG patients. Furthermore, we found that DNA hypomethylation results in its overexpression in LGG. In addition, functional annotation confirmed that SNX20 was mainly involved in the immune response and inflammatory response related signaling pathways, including the T cell receptor signaling pathway, natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity, and the NF-kappa B signaling pathway. Finally, we determined that increased expression of SNX20 was correlated with infiltration levels of various immune cells and immune checkpoint in LGG. Importantly, we found that SNX20 was highly expressed in glioma cell lines. Depletion of SNX20 significantly inhibits glioma cell proliferation and migration abilities. This is the first study to identify SNX20 as a new potential prognostic biomarker and characterize the functional roles of SNX20 in the progression of LGG, and provides a novel potential diagnostic and therapeutic biomarker for LGG in the future.