in silico and experimental analyses of long non-coding rna tmpo-as1 expression in iranian patients with gastric cancer

Background: in recent decades, many long non-coding rnas (lncrnas) have been reported to play a prominent role in tumorigenesis and the progression of human cancers, including gastric cancer (gc), a leading cause of cancer death in iranian men and women. studies have demonstrated that thymopoietin antisense transcript 1 (tmpo-as1) was upregulated in different cancers by acting as an oncogenic lncrna. objectives: this study aimed to evaluate the expression of lncrna tmpo-as1 in iranian patients with gc. methods: in order to conduct the present study, 40 gastric tumor samples and 40 marginal noncancerous counterparts were collected. the characteristics of patients’ samples were recorded, and the tmpo-as1 expression levels were evaluated by qrt-pcr analysis. the cancer genome atlas (tcga) data for tmpo-as1 were used and analyzed through gepia and tanric online tools. receiver operating characteristic (roc) curve analysis was used to estimate the diagnostic value. student t-test, one-way anova, and chisquare test were accomplished via spss software. results: our data demonstrated that tmpo-as1 was overexpressed in cancerous tissues compared to adjacent nonmalignant ones (p = 0.0076). none of the demographic and clinicopathological data were associated with tmpo-as1 expression levels. the tcga data demonstrated that tmpo-as1 was upregulated in gc tissues in comparison to adjacent nonmalignant ones (p = 0.001). roc curve analysis suggested that tmpo-as1 expression levels could discriminate gc tumor tissues from normal ones (auc = 0.699, p = 0.001). conclusions: altogether, in our study, we demonstrated that lncrna tmpo-as1 may be considered a biomarker in iranian patients with gc. however, further investigations are required to confirm the potential application of this lncrna in diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic applications of gc.