Identification of Epithelial FTL Expression as an Important Predictor for Prognosis of Colon Adenocarcinoma

Ferroptosis has been shown to be a non-self apoptotic, iron ion-catalysed, controlled cell death process involving cellular lipid oxides. The gnes that may affect ferroptosis may be candidate biomarkers. But the value and predictive value of ferroptosis-related genes in colorectal adenocarci-noma (COAD) are not fully understood. Therefore, we analyzed the expression status in COAD and healthy colon tissue using GEO, GEPIA and HPA databases. The role of predictive and genetic alter-ations of ferroptosis-related genes were investigated using cBioPortal, HPA, PrognoScan, STRING, GeneMANIA and LinkedOmics databases. Then, immunohistochemistry staining was performed to detect the both epithelial and stromal expression of FTL in COAD. Using FerrDb and GEO databases, the transcript levels of XBP1, TSC22D3 and YWHAE were identified to correlate with advanced tumor stage, FTL, DUSP1, TSC22D3 and GDF15 were related to poor prognosis of COAD. As immunohistochemistry staining shown that FTL was significantly up-regulated in COAD tissues. Cox survival analysis and KM survival analysis indicated that high epithelial FTL levels is associated with a poor prognosis in COAD.