A Pan-Cancer Analysis of the Tumorigenic Role of Yin-Yang1 (YY1) in Human Tumors

Abstract Background: Yin-yang1 (YY1) is a nuclear transcription factor possessing dual transcriptional activity, which has different expression in a variety of tumor tissues. However, it remains unclear that the role of YY1 in most tumors and its association with immune cell infiltration.Methods: The expression of YY1 was analyzed in pan-cancer data which were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. The clinical survival data downloading from TCGA was used to analyze the effect of YY1 on clinical prognosis. We had access to the R package “clusterProfiler” to make the enrichment analysis of YY1. The score of the immune cell infiltration of TCGA samples was downloaded from published articles and the correlation between YY1 expression and the immune cell infiltration was analyzed.Results: YY1 had a high expression in 25 tumors and strongly associated with clinical stage. In most tumor types, the over-expression of YY1 was connected to the worse prognostic indicator, such as overall survival(OS), progression-free survival (PFS), disease-specific survival(DSS) and disease-free survival (DFS). Moreover, the expression of YY1 had a correlation with tumor mutation burden(TMB). Nearly all of immune-related genes had co-expression with YY1 and almost all genes had positive correlation with YY1 in all types of tumors. It's worth noting that the expression levels of B cells and T cells were lower in the group with high YY1 expression. In addition, 22 m6A methylation-related cells were co-expressed with YY1, such as METTL3, YTHDC1, FTO and so on. Conclusions: Our study leads to a suggestion that YY1 may be a marker of bad prognosis and high expression of YY1 may lead to immune infiltration and be connected to m6A methylation.