Comprehensive analysis and identification of key genes and signaling pathways in the occurrence and metastasis of cutaneous melanoma

作者：Hanying Dai, Lihuang Guo, Mingyue Lin, Zhenbo Cheng, Jiancheng Li, Jinxia Tang, Xisha Huan, Yue Huang, Keqian Xu · 发表于：PeerJ · 年份：2020 · DOI：10.7717/peerj.10265 · 被引用次数：16 · 研究领域：Melanoma and MAPK Pathways、Cutaneous Melanoma Detection and Management、Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks

BACKGROUND: Melanoma is a malignant tumor of melanocytes, and the incidence has increased faster than any other cancer over the past half century. Most primary melanoma can be cured by local excision, but metastatic melanoma has a poor prognosis. Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is prone to metastasis, so the research on the mechanism of melanoma occurrence and metastasis will be beneficial to diagnose early, improve treatment, and prolong life survival. In this study, we compared the gene expression of normal skin (N), primary cutaneous melanoma (PM) and metastatic cutaneous melanoma (MM) in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. Then we identified the key genes and molecular pathways that may be involved in the development and metastasis of cutaneous melanoma, thus to discover potential markers or therapeutic targets. METHODS: Three gene expression profiles (GSE7553, GSE15605 and GSE46517) were downloaded from the GEO database, which contained 225 tissue samples. R software identified the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between pairs of N, PM and MM samples in the three sets of data. Subsequently, we analyzed the gene ontology (GO) function and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway of the DEGs, and constructed a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. MCODE was used to seek the most important modules in PPI network, and then the GO function and KEGG pathway of them were analyzed. Finally, the hub genes were calculated by the cytoHubba in Cytoscape soft...