Comprehensive Analysis of Sterol O-Acyltransferase 1 as a Prognostic Biomarker and Its Association With Immune Infiltration in Glioma

Metabolic reprogramming is a hallmark of glioma, and is an essential target for metabolic therapy. However, the prognostic value of and its association with immune infiltration has not been fully elucidated. Using RNA-seq and clinical data of glioma patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), was found to be correlated with poor prognosis in glioma and the advanced malignancy of clinicopathological characteristics. Next, the correlation between expression and tumor-infiltrating immune cells was performed using the single-sample GSEA algorithm, gene expression profiling interactive analysis (GEPIA), and tumor immune estimation resource version 2 (TIMER2.0); it was found that expression was positively correlated with multiple tumor-infiltrating immune cells. To further verify these results, immunofluorescence was conducted on paraffin-embedded glioma specimens, and a positive trend of the correlation between expression and Treg infiltration was observed in this cohort. Finally, differentially expressed gene analysis, and Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analyses were performed to explore the biological processes and signaling pathways that may be involved in during glioma pathogenesis. A protein-protein interaction network was established, and co-expression analysis was conducted to investigate the regulatory mechanism of in glioma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study reporting that may serve as a novel prognostic biomarker associated with immune infiltrates, providing a novel perspective for glioma metabolic therapy.