A comprehensive bioinformatics analysis of UBE2C in cancers

Ubiquitination is one of the main post-translational modification of proteins. It plays key roles in a broad range of cellular functions, including protein degradation, protein interactions, and subcellular location. In the ubiquitination system, different proteins are involved and their dysregulation can lead to various human diseases, including cancers. By using data available from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) databases, we here show that the ubiquitin conjugating enzyme, E2C (UBE2C), is overexpressed in all 27 cancers we investigated. UBE2C expression is significantly higher in late-stage tumors, which might indicate its involvement in tumor progression and invasion. This study also revealed that patients with higher UBE2C levels showed a shorter overall survival (OS) time and worse OS prognosis. Moreover, our data show that UBE2C higher-expression leads to worse disease-free survival prognosis (DFS), indicating that UBE2C overexpression correlates with poor clinical outcomes. We also identified genes with positive correlations with UBE2C in several cancers. We found a number of poorly studied genes (family with sequence similarity 72-member D, FAM72D; meiotic nuclear divisions 1, MND1; mitochondrial fission regulator 2, MTFR2; and POC1 centriolar protein A, POC1A) whose expression correlates with UBE2C. These genes might be considered as new targets for cancers therapies since they showed overexpression in several cancers and correlate with worse OS prognosis.