https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5965-3477
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ABSTRACT
Chordin (CHRD) is a secreted protein important in early development, yet a role for CHRD in human disease has not been identified. In this study we investigated CHRD in cancer and normal adult tissues using the wealth of genome-wide data available in public databases. We found that Chordin is amplified in the DNA of specific cancers such as lung squamous cell and others, although copy number variation did not strictly correlate with higher mRNA expression. In some cancers, such as renal and stomach carcinomas, increased CHRD expression significantly correlated with poor survival. In normal adult human tissues, CHRD mRNA was highest in hepatocytes. Crossveinless-2/BMPER, a component of the Chordin morphogenetic pathway expressed at the opposite side in embryos, was expressed in liver stellate cells. This raises the intriguing possibility that a BMP gradient might be established in the extracellular matrix of the space of Disse that surrounds portal sinusoid capillaries.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Statistical Analyses
Statistical analyses were performed in Excel (Microsoft Corp) and R-Studio via two-tailed Student’s t-test. Differences of means were considered significant at a significance level of 0.05 (p ≤ .05).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are from the following resources available in the public domain: cBio Cancer Genomics Portal (https://www.cbioportal.org/), Dependency Map (https://depmap.org/portal/), Genotype-Tissue Expression portal (https://gtexportal.org/home/), Human Protein Atlas (https://www.proteinatlas.org/), and the Cancer Genome Atlas (https://portal.gdc.cancer.gov/).
Abbreviations
| BMP | = | Bone Morphogenetic Protein |
| BMPER | = | BMP Binding Endothelial Regulator |
| cBioPortal | = | cBio Cancer Genomics Portal |
| CHRD | = | Chordin |
| CNV | = | Copy Number Variantion |
| CV2 | = | Crossveinless-2 |
| DepMap | = | Dependency Map |
| FPKM | = | Fragments per kilobase of exon per million mapped fragments |
| GTEx | = | Genotype-Tissue Expression |
| HPA | = | Human Protein Atlas |
| Ntpm | = | Normalized transcript per million |
| scRNA-seq | = | Single-cell RNA-sequencing |
| TCGA | = | The Cancer Genome Atlas |
| Tsg | = | Twisted gastrulation |
| UMAP | = | Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection |
| vWF-C | = | von Willebrand factor C domain. |