Role of PYCR1 gene in tumor immunity and prognosis from the perspective of bioinformatics

REN Chenlu; MA Boyi; YANG Hong

doi:10.13276/j.issn.2097-1656.2026.04.002

Abstract：Objective To analyze the expression of pyrroline-5-carboxylate reductase 1(PYCR1)gene in pan-cancer and its role in tumor immunity and prognosis,and to explore the value of PYCR1 in tumor immunotherapy and clinical prognosis.Methods The UALCAN,TCGA,GEO,and GTEx databases were utilized for pan-cancer analysis of differential expression of PYCR1 gene.The relationship between PYCR1 gene expression and prognosis was determined through Kaplan-Meier curve and univariate Cox regression.CIBERSORT and ESTIMATE algorithms were used to evaluate the correlation with tumor immune infiltration.Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was used to analyze the association between PYCR1 and tumor mutational burden,microsatellite instability,as well as immune-related gene clusters.Immune-related process gene clusters were obtained from KEGG database for further correlation analysis.GEO and HPA databases were used as external cohort validation sets.Results PYCR1 gene was highly expressed in a wide variety of tumors,and survival analysis showed that it was closely related to the prognosis of a wide variety of tumors,among which ACC,KIRC,KIRP,MESO,PAAD,SARC,and SKCM could be used as a significant risk factor,indicating poor prognosis of patients.Immune infiltration suggested that PYCR1 was correlated with immune cell infiltration in a variety of tumors,and macrophages and T cell subsets were the most correlated with PYCR1 expression.PYCR1 expression was significantly correlated with the mutation load of STES,STAD,LUAD,KIRC,and KIPAN.There was a significant correlation between PYCR1 expression and microsatellite instability of UCEC,STES,STAD,and KICA.Pathway enrichment analysis showed that PYCR1 was involved in many important biological processes such as amino acid metabolism,REDOX,and cell death.GEO and HPA databases verified the differential expression of PYCR1 in ovarian cancer,cervical cancer,and hepatocellular carcinoma.Conclusion PYCR1 is expected to be a tumor marker of pan-cancer and can be used to evaluate the effect of tumor immunotherapy and evaluate the prognosis of cancer patients,which is of great significance for clinical diagnosis,treatment and prognosis of cancer.