IQGAP and HspB8: Potent biomarkers in low grade gliomas

Abstract

Low grade gliomas are invasive brain tumors that mostly occur among young adults. Previous studies showed that LGG is characterized by IDH1/2 mutations; however, there were some cases where the cancer patients suffer low mutation rate of those genes. In this study, two genes are proposed as new biomarkers: IQGAP and HspB8. IQGAP has been found to be correlated with various types of cancer, while HspB8 role in LGG has not been determined, according to F-Census database. This study is aimed to identify the expressions of IQGAP and HspB8 genes among LGG patients and assess their potential to be the next biomarkers. The expression data was derived from The Cancer Genome Atlas project and downloaded using TCGA Assembler. Then, IQGAP - miRNA expression correlations and HspB8 expression analysis were conducted using Matlab and Microsoft Excel, respectively. The results were validated using miRTarBase and Firebrowse. The results showed that the strongest IQGAP - miRNA negative correlation was dominated by IQGAP2, peaked at -0.41. HspB8, on the other hand, was found to be highly expressed in LGG. However, due to lack of researches, their roles have not been validated yet. Therefore, the results from this study might become basis for further wet-lab studies.