High RASEF expression is associated with a significantly better prognosis in colorectal cancer

This study mainly studied the correlation of RASEF expression and the clinical index of colorectal cancer by tissue microarray (TMAs, HCol-Adel180sur-06) containing tissue samples of 90 colorectal cancers. The results showed that RASEF was significantly highly expressed both in nuclei (3.07 +/- 1.95 vs 1.83 +/- 1.74, P=0.000) and cytoplasm (7.74 +/- 2.08 vs 5.83 +/- 1.97, P=0.000) compared to their para-carcinoma tissues, which was in line with the data of the Oncomine database. The correlation between RASEF expression and microsatellite instability, analyzed by Spearman's correlation analysis showed that RASEF expression in colorectal cancer cytoplasm was correlated significantly with the mismatch repair genes MLH1 (P=0.037; r=0.227) and MSH6 (P=0.038; r=0.224). Additionally, high RASEF expression was associated with a significantly better prognosis (45.3% vs 8%, P=0.041), which was consistent with the data of the Human Protein Atlas. Subsequently, Cox analysis of multi-factor survival showed that RASEF expression was an independent predictive factor for colorectal cancer (P=0.001). Thus, we speculated that RASEF may be a suppressor gene, and may inhibit the development of colorectal cancer through participating in DNA repair processes.