Molecular Marker Discovery and effect Evaluation of KRT17 and COL1A1 in Esophageal Cancer Detection

Abstract Esophageal cancer is one of the malignant tumors in the digestive system. Because the early symptoms of esophageal cancer are occult and lack effective screening of specific molecular markers of esophageal cancer, most patients are in the middle or advanced stage at the time of treatment, and the 5-year survival rate is low. This study aimed to find molecular biomarkers of clinical value in the development and diagnosis of esophageal cancer. The factors affecting esophageal cancer were identified by clinical factor analysis and tissue transcriptome sequencing of 180 cases of esophageal cancer in Jiangsu, China. The results of the Chi-square test and correlation analysis demonstrated that: a). relative expression of KRT17 was higher in esophageal cancer with diabetes (P = 0.036); b). expression of KRT17 correlated with blood glucose levels (r = 0.186, P = 0.013) and tumor size (r = -0.197, P = 0.009) in esophageal cancer patients; c). and expression of COL1A1 correlated with age (r = -0.148, P = 0.047) and blood glucose levels (r = 0.212, P = 0.004) in esophageal cancer patients; d). Experimental results of QRT-RCR: KRT17 and COL1A1 genes were highly expressed in esophageal cancer, respectively (P < 0.05); when the two genes were used as a combination test, the positive detection rate of esophageal cancer was 90.6%, ROC curve, specificity, and sensitivity had greater power, and KRT17 and COL1A1 genes had the potential to be biomarkers for the diagnosis of esophageal cancer.