Clinical information summary of ATF3 in ovarian patients
The ovarian patient information was obtained from the TCGA and cBioprtal database. As shown in Fig. 1, the database collected 585 patients suffering ovarian tumor. In TCGA ovarian database, the diagnosis-year range of ovarian cancer is 35–85 and the median is about 57.5 year old. This result is consistent that diagnosis stage of ovarian patients is always too late and cause the poor prognosis.25 ATF3, as a activation transcription factor and a member of ATF/CREB transcription factor family, can bind to transcription promoters (E2, E3 and E4) with common sequence “CGTCA”26. The overexpression of ATF3 gene may activate the transcription process of many critical genes to promote the tumorigenesis.
Here, we carefully analyzed the mRNA expression of ATF3 in ovarian tumor. As shown in Fig. 1A, all the patients considering the genetic condition of ATF3 gene can be classified into two sub-groups, alteration and no alteration. By analyzing the ATF3 status in these ovarian patients, we found that the mutation ratio of ATF gene is ~ 2.4%, including missense mutation (0.17%, 1 case), amplification (10 cases, 1.71%), deep deletion (0.51%, 3 cases). And, the most frequency of ATF3 protein occurred at the NO. 145 site (mutated from methionine to Threonine), while this mutation site is not attributed to the leucine-zipper binding region (Fig. 1B). By analysis the overall survival dependence on the alteration (n = 14) and no alteration (n = 571), no significance was observed (longrank test p-value = 0.872).
To analysis the expression level of ATF3 based on the genetic condition, we found that the genetic condition did not significantly affect the expression of ATF3 (Fig. 2A). However, the expression level of ATF3 in ovarian tumor tissue is significantly lower than the normal tissue (Fig. 2B). To further analysis the expression level of ATF3 in different stages of ovarian tumor, we found that the expression level of ATF3 in early stage of patients is significantly higher than normal tissue (Fig. 2C). Dependence on the progression of ovarian tumor, the expression level of ATF3 is increasing (Fig. 2D-E). These results implied that ATF3 gene plays a positive role in promoting the tumor proliferation.
Effect of ATF3 expression level on the OS and PFS
In order to explore the effect of ATF3 expression level on the overall survival and progression-free survival, we performed the Kaplan-Meier analysis utilizing Kaplan-Meier Plotter. As shown in Fig. 3, the ovarian patients with lower expression of ATF3 suffered the better survival than higher expression groups. The median survival time of low and high expression of ATF gene are 48.07 months and 44.3 months, respectively. Meanwhile, progression-free survival (PFS) of low expression of ATF3 genes also was better than high expression group (p value = 0.012). The median survival of PFS is 22.57 month and 17.9 months, respectively. Compared with the decreasing of median survival of OS (8.5%), ATF3 expression level deeply affected the median survival of PFS (26.7%). By performing the K-M analysis based on the various types of clinicopathological factors (Table 1), we found that patients can benefit from the lower expression of ATF3 in ovarian tumor, expect in Stage 4, grad 1 or 1 + 2 and Endometrioid. These results reveal that the ovarian patients can benefit from the low expression of ATF3.
Table 1
Kaplan-Meier plotter to determine the effect of different clinicopathological factors on the expression of ATF3 in ovarian cancer
Clinicopathological characteristics | Overall survival (n = 557) | Progression-free survival (n = 522) |
N | Hazard ratio | p-value | N | Hazard ratio | p-value |
Stage | | | | | | |
2 + 3 | 454 | 1.52(1.13–2.05) | 0.0053 | 425 | 1.49(1.13–1.96) | 0.004 |
2 + 3 + 4 | 539 | 1.4(1.08–1.81) | 0.011 | 506 | 1.42(1.1–1.84) | 0.0068 |
3 | 427 | 1.64(1.21–2.21) | 0.0012 | 400 | 1.51(1.14–2.01) | 0.0039 |
3 + 4 | 512 | 1.48(1.16–1.89) | 0.0017 | 481 | 1.44(1.1–1.87) | 0.0067 |
4 | 85 | 1.58(0.89–2.81) | 0.11 | 81 | 1.56(0.8–3.04) | 0.19 |
Grade | | | | | | |
1 + 2 | 75 | 1.62(0.79–3.34) | 0.18 | 71 | 1.47(0.81–2.65) | 0.2 |
2 | 69 | 1.6(0.77–3.32) | 0.2 | 65 | 1.47(0.8–2.72) | 0.21 |
2 + 3 | 538 | 1.45(1.11–1.88) | 0.0057 | 505 | 1.36(1.08–1.72) | 0.0096 |
3 | 469 | 1.47(1.13–1.91) | 0.0037 | 440 | 1.45(1.09–1.93) | 0.011 |
TP53 | | | | | | |
Mutated | 382 | 1.67(1.2–2.32) | 0.002 | 359 | 1.65(1.24–2.19) | 0.00046 |
Wild-type | 75 | 2.02(1.01–4.06) | 0.043 | 65 | 0.67(0.32–1.37) | 0.27 |
Histology | | | | | | |
Endometrioid | 51 | 3.08(0.89–10.66) | 0.062 | N.A. | N.A. | N.A. |
Serious | 522 | 1.35(1.06–1.69) | 0.012 | 557 | 1.41(1.09–1.83) | 0.0079 |
Go Functional Analysis Of Degs In Ovarian Tumor
In order to explore the mechanism of ATF3 in promoting the tumorigenesis, we identified the DEGs using GEPIA2.0 with |log2(FoldChange)|>1.0 & p-value < 0.01. Here, there are 3195 genes identified as the DEGs and these genes were employed to perform the GO analysis based on the up- and down-regulation, respectively. As shown in Fig. 4A, the GO analysis of down-regulated genes showed that cell skeleton-related annotations were enriched, for example actin binding, actin cytoskeleton organization, actin filament-based process, extracellular. Cytoskeleton is highly related with the cell invasion27 and metastasis28 of cancer cells. These enriched annotations of down-regulated genes indicated that ATF3 may participate into regulating the transcription of these genes and further affecting the cell cytoskeletons. Meanwhile, the matrix-related annotations were also enriched, i.e. extracellular structure organization, extracellular matrix organization, extracellular matrix structure constituent, extracelluar region and collagen-containing extracellular matrix. The lower expression of matrix-related genes can rebuild the microenvironment of tumor and further affected the tumor proliferation.
For the up-regulated DEGs, we found that heme-related mitotic cell cycle process-related annotations were enriched. Heme is the critical cofactor in forming the electron transport chain complexes and participates into the oxidative phosphorylation process29. Higher expression of heme-related annotations indicated that the ovarian tumor tissue strengthened the oxygen consumption process. The enhancement of oxidase activity, i.e. cytochrome-c oxidase activity and heme-copper terminal oxidase activity, were consistent with the up-regulation of heme-related functions. The enhancement of oxygen consumption of heme-related oxidation process also can affect the mitotic process, which are cell division, mitotic cell cycle process and mitotic nuclear division.
Protein = protein Interaction Network Analysis
In order to identify the hub genes, PPI analysis of DEGs was performed and these network was further clustered by kmean method. As shown in Fig. 5A, we can find several hub genes, i.e. C3AR1, FCFR1G, FRR1, IGFBP3, TMP2, SOCS1, SOCS3, CCNB1, UBE2C and CDK1. C3AR1, FCFR1G, IGFBP3, SOCS1/3 were the inflammation-related genes, which participated the RTK signaling and regulated the mitotic process30. The network of these clustered groups were regenerated in Fig. 5B-E, respectively. Then, we ranked the nodes of PPI network based on the connecting degree and the top 10 genes were selected to further analysis of genetic functions. As shown in Table 2, we found that the most of these genes are related with the mitotic processes. The PPI results indicated that the overexpression level of ATF3 may affect the progression process through regulating the mitotic process.
Table 2
Biological functions of top 10 hub genes.
Gene | Biological functions | Gene | Biological functions |
C3AR1 | an anaphylatoxin released during activation of the complement system. | CCNB1 | a regulatory protein involved in mitosis |
ITGAM | leukocyte-specific integrin referred to as macrophage receptor 1 ('Mac-1'), or inactivated-C3b (iC3b) receptor 3 ('CR3'). | CXCL12 | plays a role in many diverse cellular functions, including embryogenesis, immune surveillance, inflammation response, tissue homeostasis, and tumor growth and metastasis. |
IGF1 | Involved in mediating growth and development. | POMC | preproprotein that undergoes extensive, tissue-specific, post-translational processing via cleavage by subtilisin-like enzymes known as prohormone convertases |
CDK1 | essential for G1/S and G2/M phase transitions of eukaryotic cell cycle | THBS1 | an adhesive glycoprotein that mediates cell-to-cell and cell-to-matrix interactions |
UBE2C | required for the destruction of mitotic cyclins and for cell cycle progression, and may be involved in cancer progression | IGF2 | involved in development and growth |
Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (Gsea)
In order to explore the impact of overexpression of ATF3, we performed the GSEA (Fig. 6) to identify the highly relative pathways using Hallmark, Reactome, KEGG and Wikipathway gene sets. As shown in Fig. 6A, the GSEA analysis using Hallmark gene set showed that the spermatogenesis, glycolysis, cholesterol homeostasis, mitotic spindle, MTORC1 signaling, MYC targets V1, G2M checkpoint and E2F targets are up-regulated, implying that the ATF3 gene can promote the mitotic process of ovarian cells. And, the inflammatory response, apoptosis, epithelial mesenchymal transition and xenobitic metabolism showed that the overexpressed ATF3 may inhibit the inflammation-related pathways. Moreover, other types of GSEA (Fig. 6B-D and Fig. 7–8) based on Reactome, KEGG and Wikipathway gene set also confirmed these results and also were consistent with GO functional analysis.
Correlation between ATF3 expression level and immune cell infiltration
The most lethal reason of cancers is the metastasis to organism and it leads the multiple organism dysfunctions31. Moreover, the immune cells always anticipate the metastasis process of cancer tumors32–33. Consequently, we carefully investigated the correlation between immune cell infiltration and ATF3 expression levels by using TIMER database. As shown in Fig. 9, most of immune cell inflitration (B cell, macrophage, T cell CD8+, neutrophil, NK, T cell CD4+) are highly associated with the ATF3 expression, while higher expression of ATF3 will decrease the immune cell infiltration of macrophage (R=-0.152, p value = 1.65e-02) and T cell CD8+ (R=-0.16, p value = 1.15e-02). Then, we explored the impact of immune cell infiltration on the patient’ survival period by Kapplan-Meier analysis. As shown in Fig. 10, we can find that the immune cells did not affect the survival period. These results indicated that immune cell infiltration may affect the ATF3 expression. Moreover, we also explored the correlation between ATF3 and immune cell biomarker expression by using TIMER database. As shown in Table 3, we only observed that M1 macrophage biomarker (PTGS2), M2 macrophage (CD163, VSIG4, MS4A4A) TAM biomarker (CCL2, IL10), Th1 (STAT1), Th2 (STAT6, STAT5A), Tfh (BCL6), Th17 (STAT3), Treg (STAT5B, TGFB1), T cell exhaustion (CLTA4) is significantly associated with ATF expression. And, the correlation between ATF3 expression and related immune cells (M1 & M2 macrophage, TAM and monocyte) is showed in Fig. 10. By analysis these results, we found that only M2 macrophage markers (PTGS2 and IRF5) is highly correlated with ATF3 expression, which is consistent with GEPIA 2 results (Table 4). M2 macrophage, activated by immune factors (e.g. IL4 and IL10), can improve the tumor metastasis and invasion by secreting some factors34. By considering the clinicopathology of higher ATF3 expression ovarian cancer, our results demonstrated that ATF3 may play a critical role in improving the ovarian invasion, which will lead serious metastasis.
Table 3
Correlation analysis between ATF3 and relative immune cell biomarkers in ovarian by TIMER.
Immune cells | General markers | Ovarian |
None |
Cor | p-value |
CD8 + T cell | CD8A | -0.001 | 0.987 |
CD8B | -0.078 | 0.222 |
T cell (general) | CD3D | -0.001 | 0.993 |
CD3E | 0.002 | 0.973 |
CD2 | -0.024 | 0.701 |
B cell | CD19 | 0.015 | 0.81 |
CD79A | -0.048 | 0.452 |
Monocyte | CD86 | 0.074 | 0.245 |
CD115 | 0.091 | 0.154 |
TAM | CCL2 | 0.195 | 0.00201 |
CD68 | 0.046 | 0.467 |
IL10 | 0.312 | 5.21e-07 |
M1 Macrophage | NOS2 | 0.047 | 0.459 |
IRF5 | 0.077 | 0.223 |
PTGS2 | 0.375 | 9.41e-10 |
M2 Macrophage | CD163 | 0.133 | 3.6e-02 |
VSIG4 | 0.114 | 7.2e-02 |
MS4A4A | 0.114 | 7.3e-02 |
Neutrophils | CEACAM8 | 0.14 | 0.0269 |
ITGAM | 0.095 | 0.136 |
CCR7 | 0.085 | 0.179 |
Natural killer cell | KIR2DL1 | 0.103 | 0.0723 |
KIR2DL3 | 0.107 | 0.0625 |
KIR2DL4 | 0.055 | 0.343 |
KIR3DL1 | 0.025 | 0.698 |
KIR3DL2 | 0.002 | 0.74 |
KIR3DL3 | 0.099 | 0.0615 |
KIR2DS4 | 0.065 | 0.259 |
Dendritic cell | HLA-DPB1 | 0.015 | 0.797 |
HLA-DQB1 | 0 | 1 |
HLA-DRA | -0.001 | 0.981 |
HLA-DPA1 | 0.019 | 0.738 |
CD1C | -0.057 | 0.325 |
NRP1 | 0.081 | 0.161 |
ITGAX | 0.062 | 0.281 |
Th1 | TBX21 | -0.018 | 0.755 |
STAT4 | 0.029 | 0.614 |
STAT1 | 0.126 | 0.0279 |
IFNG | 0.006 | 0.913 |
TNF | 0.127 | 0.0265 |
Th2 | GATA3 | -0.039 | 0.504 |
STAT6 | 0.236 | 3.44E-05 |
STAT5A | 0.157 | 6.12E-03 |
IL13 | 0.104 | 0.0697 |
Tfh | BCL6 | 0.125 | 0.0292 |
IL21 | -0.047 | 0.419 |
Th17 | STAT3 | 0.116 | 0.0444 |
IL17A | -0.068 | 0.239 |
Treg | FOXP3 | 0.102 | 0.107 |
CCR8 | 0.058 | 0.361 |
STAT5B | 0.166 | 8.52E-03 |
TGFB1 | 0.132 | 3.69E-02 |
T cell exhaustion | PDCD1 | 0.055 | 0.388 |
CTLA4 | 0.13 | 0.0406 |
LAG3 | 0.008 | 0.903 |
HAVCR2 | 0.071 | 0.261 |
GZMB | -0.007 | 0.91 |
Note: correlation coefficiency and p-value of purity in immune cell infiltration is -0.001 and 0.993, respectively. |
Table 4
Correlation analysis between ATF3 expression levels and immune cell biomarkers (monocyte, TAM and macrophages) by using GEPIA 2
Immune cells | Biomarkers | Ovarian |
Tumor tissue | Normal tissue |
R | p-value | R | p-value |
Monocyte | CD86 | 0.099 | 0.04 | 0.52 | 0.069 |
CSF1R | 0.11 | 0.029 | -0.1 | 0.35 |
TAM | CCL2 | 0.19 | 6.6E-05 | 0.43 | 3.1e-05 |
CD68 | 0.037 | 0.44 | -0.031 | 0.77 |
IL10 | 0.36 | 2.9E-14 | 0.039 | 0.72 |
M1 Macrophage | NOS2 | -0.0051 | 0.92 | -0.11 | 0.2 |
IRF5 | 0.089 | 0.065 | -0.1 | 0.35 |
PTGS2 | 0.16 | 0.0012 | 0.66 | 4.4E-12 |
M2 Macrophage | CD163 | 0.03 | 0.54 | -0.061 | 0.57 |
VSIG4 | 0.051 | 0.29 | -0.072 | 0.5 |
MS4A4A | 0.1 | 0.038 | -0.063 | 0.56 |