TUBB, a robust biomarker with satisfying abilities in diagnosis, prognosis, and immune regulation via a comprehensive pan-cancer analysis

Abstract

Purpose: TUBB can encode a beta-tubulin protein. At present, the role of TUBB has not been ascertained in cancers. Hence, the importance of further systematic pan-cancer analyses is stressed to explore its value in the diagnosis, prognosis, and immune function of cancers. Methods: By collecting and handling integrative data from the TCGA, Firehose, UCSC Xena, cBioPortal, GEO, CPTAC, TIMER2.0, TISCH, CellMiner, GDSC, and CTRP databases, we explored the potential diagnostic and prognostic roles of TUBB in pan-cancers from multiple angles. Moreover, the GSEA analysis was conducted to excavate the biological functions of TUBB in pan-cancers. In addition, survival profiles were described, and the differential expressions of TUBB in different molecular subtypes were discussed. Also, we utilized the cMAP function to search drugs or micro-molecules that have an impact on TUBB expressions. Results: Based on the TCGA data, we found that TUBB was differentially expressed in a variety of tumors and showed an early-diagnostic value. Mutations, somatic copy number alterations, and DNA methylation would lead to its abnormal expression. TUBB expressions had relations with many clinical features. What's more, TUBB expressions were validated to be related to many metabolism-related, metastasis-related, and immune-related pathways. High TUBB expressions were proved to have a great impact on the prognosis of various types of cancers and would affect the sensitivity of some drugs. We also demonstrated that the expression of TUBB was significantly correlated to immunoregulator molecules and biomarkers of lymphocyte subpopulation infiltration. Conclusion: TUBB and its regulatory genes were systemically analyzed in this study, showing that TUBB had satisfying performances in disease diagnosing and prognosis predicting of multiple cancers. It could remodel the tumor microenvironment and play an integral role in guiding cancer therapies and forecasting responses to chemotherapy.