• Investigation of LINC01012 expression in colorectal cancer
  • Maryam Afzali,1 Tahereh Sadeghian-Rizi,2,* Mansoureh Azadeh,3
    1. Department of Genetics, Faculty of Biological Sciences and Technology, Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani University, Isfahan, Iran
    2. Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Biological Sciences and Technology, Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani University, Isfahan, Iran
    3. دپارتمان زیست فناوری نوین-اصفهان


  • Introduction: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer worldwide, accounting for approximately 10% of all cancer cases and is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. LncRNAs involved in the tumor formation, angiogenesis, proliferation, migration, and etc. The oncogenic role of LINC01012 in various cancers such as cervical cancer has been identified. On the other hand, bioinformatics studies showed that LINC01012 may be up-regulated in CRC. For this reason, the aim of this study was investigation of LINC01012 expression in colorectal tissue samples and evaluation of its potential as therapeutic target and diagnostic biomarker in this cancer for first time.
  • Methods: The colorectal tumor samples and adjacent normal tissue samples were collected from thirty patients. After total RNA extraction from samples and cDNA synthesis, Real-time PCR was used to measure the LINC01012 expression. Paired t-test was used for comparison of LINC01012 expression in tumor and normal samples and receiver operating curve (ROC) was used to assess the diagnostic value of LINC01012.
  • Results: The qPCR results showed that the expression of LINC01012 was up-regulated in thirty paired colorectal cancer specimens (logFC= 2.694, p-value= 0.0059). The AUC of ROC curve was 0.7 (p-value=0.018) and revealed that the expression level of LINC01012 can detect up to 70% of cases of colorectal cancer and can be used as a diagnostic biomarker.
  • Conclusion: LINC01012 may acts as an oncogene in the CRC and may be have important role in CRC progression and metastasis. This is suggested that the potential of this LncRNA as a therapeutic target and biomarker in the different stages of CRC is evaluated in the large populations.
  • Keywords: Linc01012, colorectal cancer, cancer progression, cancer metastasis, qPCR