Esophageal cancer is one of the most common
cancers and a leading cause of
cancer-related death worldwide. However, the mechanism of
esophageal cancer pathogenesis remains poorly understood. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) dysregulation have been reported to involve in various human
cancers, which highlights the potential of lncRNAs used as novel
biomarkers for
cancer diagnosis. Although more efforts have been made to identify novel lncRNAs signature in
esophageal cancer, the expression pattern, prognostic value, and biological function of most lncRNAs in
esophageal cancer still need to be systematically investigated. In this study, we comprehensively analyzed the expression profile of lncRNAs in more than 200
esophageal cancer patients tissue samples from The
Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). We identified thousands of lncRNAs are differentially expressed in
esophageal cancer tissues, and many of those lncRNAs expression are associated with patients overall survival or recurrence-free survival time. Moreover, copy number variation analyses revealed that genomic loci copy number amplification or deletion might contribute to these lncRNAs dysregulation. Among these lncRNAs, DUXAP8 and LINC00460 were significantly upregulated, and GO enrichment analyses indicated that the two lncRNAs associated
protein-coding genes involve with many known biological processes, such as cell cycle and cell-cell adherens junction. Further experimental validation revealed that knockdown of DUXAP8 could impair
esophageal cancer cells proliferation and invasion in vitro. Taken together, our findings identified more aberrantly expressed lncRNAs in
esophageal cancer that may provide a useful resource for identifying novel
esophageal cancer associated lncRNAs.