Abstract
Background: Endometrial carcinoma (EC) is the most common cancer of female reproductive system, thus requiring for new effective biomarkers which could predict the onset of EC and worse prognosis. Cell Division Cycle Associated (CDCA) family plays indispensable roles in cell cycle process. However, no study has been focused on the role of CDCAs in EC. Our study aims to investigate the clinical relevance, potential biologic functions and molecular mechanisms of CDCAs in EC. Methods: GEPIA, cBioPortal, GeneMANIA, Networkanalyst, TCGA-UCEC cohort were utilized in this study. Results: NUF2 and CDCA2/3/4/5/7/8 were significantly highly expressed in EC compared with normal tissues. The patients with high NUF2 and CDCA2/3/4/5/8 expression tended to develop to advanced FIGO stages, poor differentiation and worse prognosis(in both OS and RFS analyses) than those with low expression. By contrast, elevated CDCA7 was significantly associated with better prognosis. CBX2 exerted no significant prognostic impact on EC patients. Distinct patterns of the genetic alterations of CDCAs were observed in various histological subtypes of EC. The biological functions of NUF2 and CDCA2/3/4/5/8 were mainly related with the activation of the following pathway: cell cycle, DNA replication, base excision repair, mismatch repair, nucleotide excision repair, cellular senescence and p53 signaling pathway. Conclusions: Our study provides new insight into the onset and progression of EC and proposes NUF2 and CDCA2/3/4/5/8 could act as oncogenes and have shown great diagnostic and prognostic promise in improving EC patient detection and survival prediction with accuracy.