The expression profile and clinical significance of circRNA0003906 in colorectal cancer

Fan Zhuo, Huashan Lin, Zhixin Chen, Zhijun Huang, Jiaping Hu Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital, College of Medicine, Nanchang University, Nanchang, People’s Republic of China Abstract: Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains a major health problem worldwide and the detailed mechanisms of CRC still need further understanding. Circular RNAs (circRNAs), a special class of endogenous RNAs, have emerged recently as a new potential player in governing fundamental biological process and cancer progression. In this study, we chose circRNA0003906 as a targeted circRNA to evaluate its expression pattern and clinical value in CRC patients. circRNA0003906 expression level in 6 CRC cell lines and 122 paired CRC tissues was measured by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. Then, the potential correlation between circRNA0003906 expression level and clinicopathological factors of CRC patients was analyzed. Additionally, a receiver operating characteristic curve was built to evaluate the diagnostic value of circRNA0003906. Our results showed that circRNA0003906 expression level was dramatically downregulated in both CRC tissues and cell lines. Moreover, the downregulation of circRNA0003906 level significantly correlated with lymphatic metastasis and poor differentiation. In addition, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of circRNA0003906 for CRC was 0.818 (P