Aim
To investigate the microRNA (miRNA) expression profile in gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) tissues that could serve as a novel diagnostic biomarker for GIST detection.
Conclusion
The identified miRNAs appear to be novel biomarkers to distinguish malignant from benign GISTs, which may be helpful to understand the mechanisms of GIST oncogenesis and progression, and to further elucidate the characteristics of GIST subtypes.
Methods
We performed a quantitative real-time quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction assay to analyze the expression of 1888 miRNAs in a sample set that included 54 GIST tissue samples.
Results
We found that dysregulation of several miRNAs may be related to the malignant potential of GISTs. Six of these miRNAs, hsa-let-7c, miR-218, miR-488#, miR-4683, miR-34c-5p and miR-4773, were selected as the final list of biomarkers to separate the malignant GISTs (M group) from the benign GISTs (B group). In addition, MiR-29b-2#, hsa-let-7c, miR-891b, miR-218, miR-204, miR-204-3p, miR-628-5p, miR-744, miR-29c#, miR-625 and miR-196a were used to distinguish between the borderline (BO group) and M groups. There were 11 common miRNAs selected to separate the benign and borderline (BB) group from the M group, including hsa-let-7c, miR-218, miR-628-5p, miR-204-3p, miR-204, miR-891b, miR-488#, miR-145, miR-891a, miR-34c-5p and miR-196a.