ADP-ribosylation factor 6 expression increase in oesophageal adenocarcinoma suggests a potential biomarker role for it

ADP-ribosylation factor 6 small GTPase plays an important role in cell migration, invasion and angiogenesis, which are the hallmarks of cancer. Although alterations in ARF6 expression and activity have been linked to metastatic cancer in one or two tissues, the expression of ARF6 in cancers over a wide range of tissues has not been studied so far. In this report, we analysed the expression of ARF6 mRNA in cancers and corresponding healthy controls from 17 different tissues by real-time qualitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). We further evaluated ARF6 protein expression in oesophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) tissue microarray cores by immunohistochemistry. The ARF6 gene expression levels are highly variable between healthy and cancer tissues. Our findings suggest that the ARF6 gene expression is up-regulated highest in oesophageal cancer. In EAC TMAs, ARF6 protein expression increase correlated with EAC progression. This is the first study to investigate ARF6 gene expression in a wide array of cancer tissues and demonstrate that ARF6 expression, at both mRNA and protein levels, is significantly upregulated in higher grades of EAC, which may be useful in targeting ARF6 for cancer diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.