Abstract
Cutaneous melanoma is the deadliest type of skin cancer, and its highly aggressive and metastatic nature leads to an extremely poor prognosis. Necrotizing apoptosis, a specific form of programmed cell death, has been extensively studied in recent years. In this study, we analyzed the relationship between necroptosis-related functional genes and cutaneous melanoma in order to identify the biomarkers associated with the prognosis and progression of cutaneous melanoma. Cutaneous melanoma samples were classified into three subgroups on the basis of a necroptosis gene set. These subgroups were subjected to a prognostic survival analysis, and the greatest differences were observed between subgroups C1 and C3. Between these subgroups, 28 necrotizing apoptosis-related genes were significantly differently expressed. Among these, 16 necrotizing apoptosis-related genes were associated with cutaneous melanoma prognosis. Downscaling analysis and prognostic modeling using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator analysis yielded nine pivotal genes and revealed phosphoglycerate translocase 5 (PGAM5) as the key gene. Then, qRT-PCR was used to verify the expression level of PGAM5. The results showed that PGAM5 was highly expressed in cutaneous melanoma tissues. In this study, a bioinformatics approach was used to identify PGAM5, a biomarker whose high expression is associated with the poor prognosis of cutaneous melanoma.