Identification of a nine ferroptosis-related lncRNA prognostic signature for lung adenocarcinoma

Abstract Background: Recently, mounting of studies has shown that lncRNA affects tumor progression through the regulation of ferroptosis. The current study aims to construct a robust ferroptosis-related lncRNAs signature to increase the predicted value of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) by bioinformatics analysis. Methods: The transcriptome data were abstracted from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Differentially expressed lncRNAs were screened by comparing 535 LAUD tissues with 59 adjacent non-LAUD tissues. Univariate Cox regression, lasso regression, multivariate Cox regression were conducted to design a ferroptosis-related lncRNA signature. This signature’s prognosis was verified by the log-rank test of Kaplan-Meier curve and the area under curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) in train set, test set, and entire set. Furthermore, univariate and multivariate Cox regression were used to analyze its independent prognostic ability. The relationship of the ferroptosis-linked lncRNAs' expression and clinical variables was demonstrated by Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Kruskal-Wallis test. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was performed to signaling pathways it may involve. Results: 1224 differentially expressed lncRNAs were identified, of which 195 are ferroptosis-related lncRNAs. A nine ferroptosis-related lncRNAs (AC099850.3, NAALADL2-AS2, AL844908.1, AL365181.2, SMIM25, FAM83A-AS1, LINC01116, AL049836.1, C20orf197) prognostic signature was constructed. This model's prognosis in the high-risk group is obviously worse than that of the low-risk group in train set, test set, and entire set. The AUC of ROC predicting the three years survival in the train set, test set, and entire set was 0.754, 0.716, and 0.738, respectively. Moreover, the designed molecular signature was found to be an independent prognostic variable. The expression of these lncRNAs and the lncRNA signature are related to clinical stage, T stage, Lymph-node status, distant metastasis. Finally, GSEA analysis results show that the signature is involved in eight tumor-related and metabolism-related signaling pathways Conclusion: The current study constructed, validated, and evaluated a nine ferroptosis-related lncRNA signature which can independently be used to predict the prognosis of LAUD patients, and may become a new therapeutic target.