Transcriptomic analysis of stromal cells from patients with endometrial carcinoma

Int J Clin Exp Pathol. 2017 Sep 1;10(9):9853-9857. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Tumor microenvironment plays a critical role in cancer pathogenesis. In this study, we performed transcriptomic analysis of stromal cells from patients diagnosed with endometrial carcinoma. Endometrial stromal cells from patients and healthy donors were cultured and total RNA was extracted for RNA integrity examination and gene profiling analysis. Gene ontology (GO) and KEGG analysis were also performed. In this study, we found that, in endometrial stromal cells from endometrial cancer patients, a total of 605 genes were changed (fold change ≥2, p-value <0.05). From these, 275 were up-regulated and 330 were down-regulated genes. In addition, GO analysis showed that the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were involved in various biological processes including cell adhesion, biological adhesion, bone development and extracellular matrix organization. Furthermore, KEGG analysis of the DEGs identified four pathways including Wnt signaling pathway, cadherin signaling pathway, ECM-receptor interaction, and focal adhesion. Our study identified 605 DEGs in stromal cells from endometrial carcinoma which mapped to a variety of biological processes. These results may contribute to understanding the molecular mechanisms o of endometrial carcinoma pathogenesis.

Keywords: Endometrial carcinoma; gene expression profiling; microenvironment; stromal cells.