Development and analysis of long non-coding RNA-associated competing endogenous RNA network for osteosarcoma metastasis

Background Osteosarcoma is the primary bone malignant neoplasm that often develops metastasis. Increasing evidences have shown that non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) relate to the progression of osteosarcoma. However, the ncRNAs’ roles in osteosarcoma metastasis are still unknown. Methods Differentially expressed (DE) RNAs were identified from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. Protein-protein interaction (PPI) of DE messenger RNAs (DEmRNAs) was built through STRING database. The target mRNAs and long ncRNAs (lncRNAs) of microRNAs (miRNA) were predicted through miRDB, Targetscan and Genecode databases, which then cross-checked with previously obtained DERNAs to construct competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network. All networks were visualized via Cytoscape and the hub RNAs were screened out through Cytoscape plug-in Cytohubba. The gene functional and pathway analyses were performed through DAVID and MirPath databases. The survival analyses of hub RNAs were obtained through Kaplan-Meier (KM) survival curves. Results Five hundred sixty-four DEmRNAs, 16 DElncRNAs and 22 DEmiRNAs were screened out. GO functional and KEGG pathway analyses showed that DERNAs were significantly associated with tumor metastasis. The ceRNA network including 6 lncRNAs, 55 mRNAs and 20 miRNAs were constructed and the top 10 hub RNAs were obtained. Above all, PI3K/AKT signaling pathway was identified as the most important osteosarcoma metastasis-associated pathway and its hub ceRNA module was constructed. The survival analyses showed that the RNAs in hub ceRNA module closely related to osteosarcoma patients’ prognosis. Conclusions The current study provided a new perspective on osteosarcoma metastasis. More importantly, the RNAs in hub ceRNA module might act as the novel therapeutic targets and prognostic factors for osteosarcoma patients. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41065-021-00174-0.


Introduction
Osteosarcoma, one of the most common primary musculoskeletal system malignant tumors, often affects children and young adults [1]. With the development of multidiscipline therapy, especially complete resection of tumor with multi-agent chemotherapy, the 5-year survival rate of patient has significantly improved to over 70% [2]. However, a large number of patients who receive standard or aggressive treatment still develop metastasis and their 5-year survival rates dramatically decrease to less than 20% [3,4]. Therefore, the promising strategy to improve the prognosis of metastasis patients has been widely investigated. Unfortunately, little progression has been acquired since the underlying mechanisms of invasion and metastasis are still unclear [5].
Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are a group of RNAs that have no protein-coding functions and play important roles in cellular physiology and pathology. Based on the length of nucleotide, ncRNAs are divided into small ncRNAs (< 200 bp) and long ncRNAs (200 to 100 kb). MicroRNAs (miRNAs), one of the most widely studied small ncRNAs, are associated with cell proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis [6]. After gene transcription, miRNAs could bind to 3'UTR (untranslated regions) of targeted messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and prevent their translation, which play vital roles in tumor occurrence and metastasis [7]. Unlike miRNAs, long ncRNAs (lncRNAs) take part in epigenetic, transcriptional, post-transcriptional and translational processes in various cells [8]. A large number of studies have revealed that lncRNAs correlate with tumor progression and act as the biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis. Some researches even find lncRNAs would be optimistic therapeutic targets of cancers [9][10][11][12][13].
The competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) hypothesis is proposed as a novel regulatory mechanism between coding RNAs and ncRNAs. Both lncRNAs and miRNAs are important components in this network. LncRNAs can bind to miRNAs through miRNA-binding sites (MREs) and act as miRNA sponges to regulate mRNA expression [14]. Plenty of researchers have constructed different ceRNA networks in various cancers. Lei et al analyzed the data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and built up a lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA regulatory network in muscle-invasive bladder cancer [15]. Fang et al constructed a ceRNA network of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma from 546 patients' profiles [16]. However, studies of ceRNA networks in osteosarcoma patients are limited and the role of lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA regulatory network between metastatic and non-metastatic osteosarcoma is still unclear.
In the present study, we obtained the differentially expressed (DE) miRNAs, mRNAs and lncRNAs between metastatic and non-metastatic patients from GSE39040 and GSE39055 datasets. The online databases was used to predict target mRNAs and lncRNAs of miRNAs. Then the ceRNA regulatory network was constructed. We also performed Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway and protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analyses of DEmiRNAs and DEmRNAs. Moreover, we identified the osteosarcoma metastasis-associated hub ceRNA module based on the KEGG pathway analysis. Kaplan-Meier (KM) survival analysis was conducted to verify the relationships between hub ceRNAs and prognosis. We hope that the present study would extend our knowledge of osteosarcoma metastasis-associated ceRNA network and provide potential therapeutic targets and prognostic markers for osteosarcoma patients.

Microarray dataset selection
The expression profiles of osteosarcoma were searched from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO, http://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo). The microarray datasets involved in this study should meet the following criteria: (1) the tumors were confirmed as osteosarcoma by histology; (2) the datasets contained metastatic and non-metastatic patients; (3) the datasets had complete prognosisassociated information; (4) the sample size in the dataset was more 10. Finally, two GEO datasets were selected for further study. The miRNA data were downloaded from GSE39040(platform GPL15762, Illumina Human v2 MicroRNA Expression BeadChip, Illumina, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) which contained 65 osteosarcoma patients. The mRNA and lncRNA data were downloaded from GSE39055(platform GPL14951, Illumina HumanHT-12 WG-DASL V4.0 R2 Expression BeadChip, Illumina, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) which had 37 osteosarcoma patients. The clinical characteristics of patients in GSE39040 and GSE39055 were shown in Supplementary Table 1.

Differential expression analysis
The probe names in the microarray datasets were converted into RNA names and multiple values of the same gene were averaged by R software (version 3.61). Patients from selected datasets were divided into metastatic and non-metastatic groups. The Linear Models for Microarray Analysis (Limma) package was applied to perform DERNAs analysis between two groups. The cutoff value of DERNAs was P<0.05 and |fold change (FC)|>1.5. The heat map was drawn through 'pheatmap' package in R software. According to the Gene database information (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene) and classification of RefSeq accession numbers and molecule types (https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21091/table/ch18.T. refseq_accession_numbers_and_mole/?report= objectonly), the DERNAs in GSE39055 were divided into DEmRNA ('NM_' or 'XM_') and DElncRNA ('NR_' or 'XR_') groups. The flow chart of this study was shown in Fig. 1.

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) network construction and analysis
To study the interaction of all DEmRNAs, the online tool Search Tool for the Retrieval of Interacting Genes database (STRING, https://string-db.org/) was used to construct PPI network [22]. The cutoff confidence score was 0.4 and the disconnected nodes were hid in the network. Then the network was visualized in Cytoscape(v3.7.1) and the top 10 hub mRNAs were screened out by Cytoscape plug-in CytoHubba. KEGG pathway analysis of hub mRNAs was also conducted by DAVID and p-value<0.05 was defined as significantly enriched.

ceRNA network construction and analysis
The overlapping mRNAs were obtained from the intersection of DEmRNAs from GSE39055 and target mRNAs of DEmiRNA. The same method was used to identify overlapping lncRNAs. Then the inverse expression pairs of miRNA-mRNA and miRNA-lncRNA were selected to construct ceRNA network via Cytoscape. Top 10 hub RNAs in ceRNA network were also screened out by CytoHubba. The KEGG pathway analysis of miRNAs in hub RNAs was conducted through their targeted mRNAs in ceRNA network by DAVID. P-value<0.05 was defined as significantly enriched. Moreover, the most important osteosarcoma metastasis-associated hub ceRNA module was identified and constructed through KEGG pathway analysis results. The hub ceRNA module was visualized by Cytoscape.

Survival analysis
The prognostic information of osteosarcoma patients was obtained from the selected dataset. All Patients were divided into high-and low-expression groups based on the expression level of RNAs in hub ceRNA module. The Kaplan-Meier survival analysis of RNAs in hub ceRNA module was conducted by 'survival' package in R software. P < 0.05 was considered as statistically significant.

Identification of DEmiRNAs, DEmRNAs and DElncRNAs
The miRNA expression data were obtained from the GSE39040 dataset, which contained 24 metastatic and 41 non-metastatic osteosarcoma patients. A total of 41 DEmiR-NAs were found and the distribution characteristics of these genes were shown in Fig. 2a. 22 of 41 DEmiRNAs IDs could convert into MiRBase IDs for further study and the information of these DEmiRNAs were shown in Table 1.
The GSE39055 dataset, which contained 19 metastatic and 18 non-metastatic osteosarcoma patients, was used to analyze DEmRNAs and DElncRNAs. A total of 600 DERNAs were identified and the heat map was used to visualize the different expression values (Fig. 2b). Five hundred sixty-four demrnas and 16 DElncRNAs in these DERNAs were identified for further study. The top 10 up and down-regulated DEmRNAs and all DElncRNAs were listed in Tables 2 and 3.

GO functional and KEGG pathway analyses of DEmiRNAs and DEmRNAs
In order to understand the potential biological functions of these DEmiRNAs, GO functional and KEGG pathway analyses were conducted by MirPath. In BP ontology, the DEmiRNAs were involved in several tumor metastatic processes such as biosynthetic process, cellular protein modification process, gene expression and catabolic process (Fig. 3a). As for CC analysis, the DEmiR-NAs were mainly distributed in organelle, nucleoplasm, protein complex, cytosol, microtubule organizing center (Fig. 3b). In MF category, DEmiR-NAs were encriched in ion binding, nucleic acid binding transcription factor activity, enzyme binding, protein binding transcription factor activity, enzyme regulator activity, cytoskeletal protein binding, RNA binding and transcription corepressor activity (Fig.  3c). Most of these functions took part in tumor metastasis processes through regulating gene expression, protein binding or enzyme activity [23][24][25].
In addition, the KEGG pathway analysis indicated that DEmiRNAs enriched in 53 different pathways (Supplementary Table 2) and the top 10 pathways were shown in Fig. 3d. A large amount of common tumor metastasis-related pathways such as TGF-beta signaling pathway, Hippo signaling pathway, Ras signaling pathway, Wnt signaling pathway and PI3K/Akt signaling pathway were involved.
The online tool DAVID was used to perform GO functional and KEGG pathway analysis for DEmRNAs. The significant result of GO functional enrichment was shown in Fig. 4a. Plenty of items, such as transcription corepressor activity, cAMP response element binding, protein serine/threonine/tyrosine kinase activity were closely related to the process of tumor metastasis [26][27][28].
KEGG pathway analysis showed that DEmRNAs significantly enriched in 8 pathways (Fig. 4b). Several tumor metastasis-associated pathways such as PI3K/Akt signaling pathway and Hippo signaling pathway were included.

PPI network construction and analysis
The online tool STRING was used to identify the correlation of DEmRNAs and construct the PPI network. A total of 564 nodes and 900 edges were involved in the PPI network. The disconnected nodes were deleted and the PPI network was input to Cytoscape for further study (Fig. 5). The Cytoscape plug-in CytoHubba was used to screen out the top 10 hub mRNAs, which included IL6, ITGB2, PPP2CA, HNRNPC, CPSF1, YWHAB, RPS6KB1, UBA7, MAP 2 K1 and RPS3A. The KEGG pathway enrichment of these hub mRNAs was performed in DAVID and the result was shown in Table 4. It is worth noting that the tumor metastasisassociated PI3K/Akt signaling pathway was included once again.

ceRNA network construction and analysis
Targetscan and miRDB were used to predict the target mRNAs of DEmiRNAs just as previously mentioned. In total, 4030 targeted mRNAs were screened out. Then these mRNAs were cross-checked with DEmRNAs in GSE39055 and the intersectional mRNAs which presented with an opposite expression trend to DEmiRNAs were selected. After that, 61 mRNA-miRNA regulatory relationships including 16 miRNAs and 55 mRNAs were obtained. The same method was used to establish the lncRNA-miRNA network through Genecode and 36 lncRNA-miRNA regulatory relationships including 6 lncRNAs and 15miRNAs were screened out. Finally, the ceRNA network which contained 6 lncRNAs,20 miRNAs and 55 mRNAs were constructed through Cytoscape (Fig. 6a). GO functional and KEGG pathway analyses of mRNAs in ceRNA network were conducted through DAVID. The GO functional enrichment result was shown in Fig. 7a and several biological processes such as regulation of growth, positive regulation of transcription from RNA polymerase II promoter, mitotic nuclear envelope reassembly had a significant impact on tumor metastasis [29,30]. The outcome of KEGG pathway enrichment of mRNAs was shown in Fig. 7b and Supplementary  Table 3. The tumor metastasis-associated pathways such as PI3K/Akt signaling pathway, TGF-beta signaling pathway, AMPK signaling pathway and HIF-1 signaling pathway were significantly enriched.
The top 10 hub RNAs in ceRNA network were screened out through Cytoscape plug-in CytoHubba. All hub RNAs were lncRNA and miRNA, including TPT1-AS1, hsa-miR-612, hsa-miR-1304, MIR137HG, MRPL20-AS1, hsa-miR-1183, KMT2E-AS1, hsa-miR-885-3p, hsa-miR-202*:9.1 and hsa-miR-1268. Then the KEGG pathway analysis of these miRNAs was conducted through their targeted mRNAs in ceRNA network ( Table 5). The tumor metastasis-associated PI3K/Akt signaling pathway was enriched once again and we identified it as the most important osteosarcoma metastasis-associated pathway because it was the only pathway that significantly enriched in every KEGG analysis result. Based on the regulatory relationships between hub RNAs and mRNAs related to PI3K/Akt signaling pathway, the osteosarcoma metastasis-associated hub ceRNA modules were constructed (Fig. 6b).

Survival analysis of RNAs in osteosarcoma metastasisassociated hub ceRNA modules
The prognosis information of patents was download from the same datasets. The KM survival curve analysis was used to identify the relation between the expression levels of RNAs in hub ceRNA module and the progression-free survival rate (PFS) of patients (Fig. 8). The results showed that different expression levels of these RNAs had a distinct impact on patients' PFS rate and most of them were statistically or borderline (8/11) significant, which indicated that these RNAs might be the promising prognostic biomarkers for osteosarcoma patients. What's more, we searched these RNAs in pubmed database and the results also showed that they were correlated with osteosarcoma progression and prognosis [31][32][33][34].

Discussion
Osteosarcoma is one of the most common bone malignant tumors and about one-fifth of patients appear clinically detectable metastases at diagnosis. The most common metastatic site of osteosarcoma is pulmonary and the 5-year survival rate of these patients is extremely low [35]. In order to improve the prognosis of patients with metastasis, the mechanism underlying metastasis was studied and first mentioned by Paget in 1889, just known as the "seed and soil" theory [36]. After that, with the development of science and technology, more theories of cancer metastasis had been proposed, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) enhancement, gene fusion and mutation, intravasation, enhancement of cancer stemness, increased angiogenesis and local invasion [37]. Unfortunately, the primary mechanism of osteosarcoma metastasis was still unclear and the In the last few years, the roles of lncRNA in various cancers had been widely studied. One important function of lncRNA was to bind to miRNAs and act as the miRNA sponge to regulate mRNA expression, which was correlated with tumor formation, progression and metastasis. These lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA regulatory relationships, also known as ceRNA network, had been reported in different cancers [15,16]. However, the ceRNA network in metastatic osteosarcoma had not been revealed. Therefore, we conducted this study and looked forward to identify the key RNAs involved in the process of metastasis.
In the present study, we got 41 DEmiRNAs from GSE39040 and 22 of them were selected for further study. 564 DEmRNAs and 16 DElncRNAs were identified from GSE39055. The GO functional analysis of these aberrantly expressed RNAs showed that they were closely related to the process of cancer metastasis, such as protein binding transcription factor activity, enzyme regulator activity, protein serine/threonine/tyrosine kinase activity and so on. As for the KEGG pathway enrichment analysis, some common cancer metastasisassociated pathways were significantly enriched, including PI3K/Akt signaling pathway, Hippo signaling pathway, Ras signaling pathway and Wnt signaling pathway. The PPI network of DEmRNAs was constructed and the hub mRNAs were screened out. These hub mRNAs were closely related to the metastatic processes in various cancers. For instance, the overexpression of miR-449a directly inhibited the translation of mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase kinase MAP 2 K1, which decreased the activity of MEK1/ERK1/2/c-Jun pathway and suppressed the invasion and metastasis of lung cancer cells [38]. IL6, one of the proinflammatory cytokines, promoted breast cancer growth and metastasis through IL6/JAK/STAT3 loop [39]. The transcriptional coactivator Yes-associated protein (YAP) induced the expression of integrin subunit ITGB2, which increased cancer cell invasion [40]. In addition, the KEGG pathway analysis revealed that the hub mRNAs were significantly enriched in PI3K/Akt signaling pathway once again. To sum up, these analyses showed that the DERNAs obtained from two datasets played important roles in the process of cancer metastasis and the results of our study were reliable.
Next, we predicted the target mRNAs and lncRNAs of DEmiRNAs from online databases and cross-checked them with previously obtained DEmRNAs or DElncR-NAs. After that, the osteosarcoma metastasis-related ceRNA network was constructed and the KEEG pathway analysis showed that the mRNAs in ceRNA network were enriched in PI3K/Akt signaling pathway once again. At the same time, the hub RNAs in ceRNA network were screened out and the miRNAs among them were enriched in PI3K/Akt signaling pathway again. Based on the results showed above, the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway was treated as the most important osteosarcoma metastasis-associated pathway because apart from it, no other pathways could be significantly enriched every time. Next, based on the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway associated hub RNAs and their targeted mRNAs, the hub osteosarcoma metastasis-associated ceRNA module was constructed. At last, the KM survival analysis showed that the vast majority of RNAs in hub ceRNA module had a significant impact on the prognosis of osteosarcoma patients.
The PI3K/AKT signaling pathway is one of the most crucial intracellular oncogenic pathways in cancers. It could be activated by G-protein-coupled receptor signaling and receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) such as vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR), platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PDGFR) and insulin-like growth factor 1 receptor (IGF1R). The activation or inhibition of PI3K/AKT signaling pathway would result in a cascade of events that played important roles in pathological processes, such as oncogenesis, invasion, metastasis, angiogenesis and proliferation [41]. What's more, almost every  [42]. Jin et al reported that suppressing the Glycoprotein nonmetastatic melanoma protein B (GPNMB) would inhibit osteosarcoma cell proliferation and metastasis via blocking PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway [43]. In the last few years, numerous studies had also revealed that ncRNAs could regulate osteosarcoma metastasis through PI3K/AKT signaling pathway. LINC00628, one of the common lncRNAs, was decreased in osteosarcoma tissues and overexpression of it would inhibit the proliferation, invasion and migration of osteosarcoma cells through PI3K/AKT signaling pathway [44]. To sum up, the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway is involved in the process of osteosarcoma metastasis and alterations in this pathway might improve the prognosis of patients.
With the development of microarray and next generation sequencing technology, numerous aberrantly expressed oncogenes were detected and most of them related to the occurrence and development of cancers. On the basis of these findings, we constructed the hub ceRNA module associated with PI3K/AKT signaling pathway, which contained three miRNAs (hsa-miR-1304, hsa-miR-202*:9.1 and hsa-miR-1183), four mRNAs (PPP2R2A, ATF2, PPP2CA and RPS6KB1) and four lncRNAs (MIR137HG, TPT1-AS1, KMT2E-AS1 and MRPL20-AS1). A number of studies found that the RNAs in our ceRNA network correlated with the proliferation, invasion and metastasis of various cancers. PPP2CA, the catalytic subunit of PP2A, was higher expressed in osteosarcoma tissues. The reduction of PPP2CA suppressed the proliferation and metastasis of  inhibited prostate cancer invasion and migration, which provided a potential target for prostate cancer treatment [45]. MiR-1304, usually regarded as a tumor suppressor, inhibited non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cell growth through suppressing heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) and was down-regulated in NSCLC samples [46]. In a word, the genes in hub ceRNA module influenced the metastasis of cancers and might act as the therapeutic targets. However, the roles of these genes in osteosarcoma were still limited and more studies should be conducted in the future.
The KM survival analysis of our study showed that RNAs in hub ceRNA network were correlated with the patients' survival rate, which indicated that they could serve as the predictors of prognosis. PPP2R2A, the upstream effectors of Akt/mTOR pathway, encoded an alpha isoform of the regulatory subunit B55 subfamily. Our research showed that osteosarcoma patients with higher expression of PPP2R2A had a worse prognosis, which was consistent with the study by Hein et al. [47] Zhou et al reported that the expression level of RPS6KB1 encoded protein p70S6K was negatively correlated with the progression of osteosarcoma patients. The same result was obtained in our KM survival analysis [33].
In conclusion, the present study screened out DElnR-NAs, DEmiRNAs and DEmRNAs between metastatic and non-metastatic osteosarcoma patients through microarray datasets in GEO database. Importantly, the ceRNA network had been constructed and the PI3K/ AKT signaling pathway was identified as the most important osteosarcoma metastasis-associated signaling pathway. The hub ceRNA module including three miR-NAs (hsa-miR-1304, hsa-miR-202*:9.1 and hsa-miR-1183), four mRNAs (PPP2R2A, ATF2, PPP2CA and RPS6KB1) and four clncRNAs (MIR137HG, TPT1-AS1, KMT2E-AS1 and MRPL20-AS1) was constructed. Our KM survival analysis and other researchers' results showed that the RNAs in hub ceRNA module might act as the novel therapeutic targets and prognostic markers for osteosarcoma patients. Based on the present study, we would continue to conduct researches in the future. It might reveal the potential mechanisms underlying osteosarcoma metastasis and improve the prognosis of osteosarcoma patients.