It has been shown that
SNAI1 expression is correlated to EC progression [
9] and USP26 stabilizes Snail1 protein in EC [
18]. Hence, we initially confirmed expression of
SNAI1 and
USP26 messenger RNA (mRNA) in EC patients.
SNAI1 was upregulated 6.23 ± 3.11 folds in the Esophagus (TCGA PanCan) data set and 6.59 ± 3.02 folds in the Esophagus (TCGA) datasets, respectively (Fig.
1a). There was no significant change in expression of
USP26 in the same datasets (Fig.
1b). We next analyzed miR-203 expression in GSE43732 and GSE6188. It is important to note that previous analysis of these 2 datasets by He et al. 2019 [
24] had shown miR-203 as one of 17 differentially expressed miRNA between EC and tumor-adjacent normal tissue in patient samples. The goal of our re-analysis was to exclusively represent relative expression of miR-203 in EC tissue and tumor-adjacent normal tissue. Confirming the previous findings [
24], in 119 paired patient samples in GSE43732, miR-203 expression was significantly downregulated in esophageal tumor tissue (Fig.
1c; P < 0.0001) and in 104 tumor-adjacent normal tissue and 153 esophageal tumor tissue patient samples in GSE6188, miR-203 expression was significantly downregulated in esophageal tumor tissue (Fig.
1d; P < 0.0001). Overall, these results validated that
SNAI1 and miR-203 expressions are up and down regulated, respectively, in EC.