The Clinical Significance and Potential Molecular Mechanism of in Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is the major histological type of esophageal cancers worldwide. Transcription factor was seen highly expressed in a variety of tumors and was related to the degree of tumor differentiation, invasion, and metastasis. However, the clinical significance of had yet to be verified, and the mechanism of abnormal expression in ESCC was not clear. In this study, the comprehensive analysis and evaluation of expression in ESCC were completed by synthesizing in-house immunohistochemistry (IHC), clinical sample tissue RNA-seq (in-house RNA-seq), public high-throughput data, and literature data. We also explored the possible signaling pathways and target genes of in ESCC by combining the target genes of (displayed by ChIP-seq), differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of ESCC, and -related genes, revealing the potential molecular mechanism of in ESCC. In the present study, protein and mRNA expression levels in ESCC tissues were all significantly higher than in non-cancerous tissues. The pool standard mean difference (SMD) of the overall expression was 1.17 (95% CI: 0.72-1.62, < 0.01), and the area under curve (AUC) of the summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) was 0.86 (95% CI: 0.83-0.89). By combining the target genes displayed by ChIP-seq of , DEGs of ESCC, and -related genes, it was observed that may interact with these genes through chemokines and cytokine signaling pathways. By constructing a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and combining ChIP-seq data, we obtained four potential target genes, , , , and . The gene expression of had a strong positive correlation with and , which suggested that might positively regulate the expression of these two genes. In summary, the high expression of may play an important role in the formation of ESCC. These roles may be completed by regulating the downstream target genes and .