SUMO1 pseudogene 3 (SUMO1P3) expression in human gastric cancer and its clinical significance

Introduction/Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate SUMO (small ubiquitin-like modifier) 1 pseudogene 3, SUMO1P3 expression, as one of the pseudogene-expressed long non-coding RNA (lncRNAs) in gastric cancer (GC) patients. Materials and Methods: Fresh gastric cancer and adjacent non-tumor tissues were collected from 182 GC patients, who were admitted to the Alzahra Hospital, Isfahan, Iran on December 2014 to January 2016. Quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction was used to investigate the SUMO1P3 levels. Then, the association between the level of SUMO1P3 in gastric cancer tissues and the clinicopathological features of patients with gastric cancer was analyzed. To find the differences of SUMO1P3 levels between gastric cancer tissues and adjacent non-tumor tissues, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied. A significance level of 0.05 was considered for the tests. Results: The results showed that SUMO1P3 levels in males were not significantly higher than those in females (p = 0.485). No significant difference of SUMO1P3 expression was observed between patients under 64 years old and above (p = 0.155). The SUMO1P3 levels were not associated with perineural invasion (p = 0.319), lymphatic invasion (p = 0.797), invasion depth (p = 0.790), location of the tumor (p = 0.811), tumor size (p = 0.635), and grading (p = 0.289). Conclusions: These results indicated that in our patient population and according to the used method in this study, pseudogene-expressed lncRNA SUMO1P3 may not be a potential biomarker in the diagnosis of gastric cancer