Multi-omics analysis identifies UBA family as potential pan-cancer biomarkers for tumor prognosis and immune microenvironment infiltration

Haibin Wang ¹ Liu Xinli ² Hesen Huang ³ Meng Tang ⁴ Ji-Wei Li ^5* Tingting Huang ^6,7* Shengjie Wang ^8*

• ¹ Department of Gastrointestinal Oncology Surgery, the First Affiliated Hospital of Xiamen University, School of Medicine, Xiamen University,, xiamen, China
• ² Department of Medical Oncology, Xiang’an Hospital of Xiamen University, 2000 East Xiang’an Road, Xiamen, China, Xiamen, Fujian Province, China
• ³ Department of Oral and Maxillo-Facial Surgery, Xiang'an Hospital of Xiamen University,, xiamen, China
• ⁴ Department of Laboratory Medicine, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China
• ⁵ Department of Respiratory, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine Xiang'an Hospital of Xiamen University, School of Medicine, Xiamen University Xiamen P. R. China, xiamen, China
• ⁶ Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
• ⁷ Xiamen Key Laboratory of Endocrine-Related Cancer Precision Medicine, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian Province, China
• ⁸ Department of Thyroid and Breast Surgery, Xiamen Humanity Hospital Fujian Medical University,, xiamen, China

Background: UBA1 and UBA6 are classic ubiquitin-activating E1 enzymes, which participate in the ubiquitination degradation of intracellular proteins and are closely related to the occurrence and development of various diseases and tumors. However, at present, comprehensive analysis has not been used to study the role of UBA family in cancers.We extracted the relevant data of cancer patients from the TCGA database and studied the relationship between the expression patterns of UBA family and the survival rate, and stage of patients in pan-cancer, especially breast cancer (BRCA), colorectal cancer (COAD), renal cancer (KIRC) and lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). In addition, we also evaluated their impact on immune infiltration using TISIDB database and R packages.Results: UBA1 and UBA6 are highly expressed in most cancer types, which may be associated with poor prognosis of patients. This study also investigated their expression had a closely tie with clinical stages in some specific tumors. Furthermore, this study also demonstrated that these genes were closely related to immune score, immune subtypes and tumor infiltrating immune cells.Our study demonstrated that the differential expression of the UBA family, along with their associated survival landscape and immune infiltration across various cancer types, holds potential as biomarkers linked to cancer immune infiltration. This finding offers a novel perspective for informing the direction of cancer treatment strategies.