Gliomas are the most common primary brain cancers. In recent years, IDH mutation and 1p/19q codeletion have been suggested as biomarkers for the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of gliomas. However, these biomarkers are only effective for a part of glioma patients, and thus more biomarkers are still emergently needed. Recently, an electrochemical communication between normal neurons and glioma cells by neuro-glioma synapse has been reported. Moreover, it was discovered that breast-to-brain metastasis tumor cells have pseudo synapses with neurons, and these synapses were indicated to promote tumor progression and metastasis. Based on the above observations, we first curated a panel of 17 synapse-related genes and then proposed a metric, synapse score to quantify the “stemness” for each sample of 12 glioma gene expression datasets from TCGA, CGGA, and GEO. Strikingly, synapse score showed excellent predictive ability for the prognosis, diagnosis, and grading of gliomas. Moreover, being compared with the two established biomarkers, IDH mutation and 1p/19q codeletion, synapse score demonstrated independent and better predictive performance. In conclusion, this study proposed a quantitative method, synapse score, as an efficient biomarker for monitoring gliomas.

中文翻译：

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一组突触相关基因作为胶质瘤的生物标志物

胶质瘤是最常见的原发性脑癌。近年来，IDH 突变和 1p/19q 编码缺失被认为是胶质瘤诊断、治疗和预后的生物标志物。然而，这些生物标志物仅对部分胶质瘤患者有效，因此仍迫切需要更多的生物标志物。最近，已经报道了通过神经胶质瘤突触在正常神经元和神经胶质瘤细胞之间进行电化学通信。此外，发现乳腺到脑转移的肿瘤细胞与神经元具有假突触，这些突触被指示促进肿瘤进展和转移。基于上述观察，我们首先策划了一组 17 个突触相关基因，然后提出了一个度量，突触评分来量化来自 TCGA、CGGA、CGGA 的 12 个神经胶质瘤基因表达数据集的每个样本的“词干性”。和GEO。引人注目的是，突触评分对胶质瘤的预后、诊断和分级显示出极好的预测能力。此外，与两个已建立的生物标志物 IDH 突变和 1p/19q 编码缺失相比，突触评分显示出独立且更好的预测性能。总之，本研究提出了一种定量方法突触评分，作为监测胶质瘤的有效生物标志物。