Abstract
The epigenetics and genomics of glioblastoma (GBM) are complicated. Previous reports indicate that ELFN2 is widely distributed in the cerebral cortex neurons, striatum, and hippocampus cone and in granular cells. However, the function and mechanism of ELFN2, particularly in GBM, have rarely been explored. In this study, we identified ELFN2 as a new hypomethylation gene that acts as an oncogene in GBM. ELFN2 promoted cell autophagy by interacting with AurkA and eIF2α and inhibiting the activation of AurkA. We also demonstrated that aberrantly high ELFN2 expression is obtained due to hypomethylation of its promoter and abnormal miR-101 and LINC00470 expression in GBM. LINC00470 not only enhanced the expression of ELFN2 through adsorption of miR-101 but also affected the methylation level of ELFN2 by decreasing H3K27me3 occupancy. In addition, LINC00470 played a dominant role in the regulation of GBM cell autophagy, even though it upregulated ELFN2 expression. The results indicate that the combination of LINC00470 and ELFN2 has important significance for evaluating the prognosis of astrocytoma patients.