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ObjectiveTo analyze the expression of molecular marker affecting the prognosis of acute myeloid leukemia （AML） patients from bioinformatics database， thus providing an experimental basis for further exploration of a novel molecular marker for the prognosis of AML. MethodsThe prognostic data of 179 AML patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas （TCGA） database were examined for differential gene analysis and survival analysis. The bone marrow samples of 74 healthy individuals （HI） and 542 de novo AML patients in the dataset GSE13159 downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus （GEO） database were analyzed to detect the difference in the expression levels of differential target genes. Peripheral blood and bone marrow samples were collected from 18 de novo AML patients and 20 age- and gender-matched healthy controls， and real-time fluorescent quantitative PCR was used to validate the expression levels of the differential genes in the AML patients. ResultsBioinformatics data analysis showed that the optimal cut-off value of Homo sapiens NK2 homeobox 3 （NKX2-3） calculated by R language was 0.051. Survival analysis revealed a statistically poorer overall survival in de novo AML patients with high NKX2-3 expression than in those with low NKX2-3 expression （P = 0.0036）. NKX2-3 was highly expressed in patients with de novo AML than in HI and the difference was statistically significant （P < 0.001）. Real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR verified the expression levels of the NKX2-3 gene in AML patients and confirmed that compared with those in HI， in the de novo AML patients， NKX2-3-1 and NKX2-3-2 were highly expressed and were significantly correlated （P = 0.000， P = 0.000）. ConclusionNKX2-3 is highly expressed in de novo AML patients， and the AML patients with high NKX2-3 expression have poor overal survival. NKX2-3 may be closely related to the clinical outcome and prognosis of AML.
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In higher vertebrates, from amphibians to humans, epidemial maturation is a conserved developmental process. Using adult epidemial tissue and an established keratinocyte cell line, the mouse Nkx-2.3 homeobox gene was demonstrated, for the first time, to be expressed in mouse epidermal keratinocytes. Under the normal culture condition, the spontaneous aggregation phenomenon, a common initiation step of ES cell differentiation, and the induction of mouse adult K1 keratin, a marker of mature epidermal keratinocytes, were both observed in vitro when the Xenopus Nkx-2.3 gene was stably transfected into a mouse pluripotent P19 EC cell line. The induction of mouse K1 keratin by using its Xenopus orthologous gene in the mouse P19 cell implies that Nkx-2.3 may play a conserved role in the epidermal maturation of the mouse, as it does in that of the frog (Ma, 2004). However, the CAT assay study on frog adult keratin promoter could not find the induction of adult keratin. This implies there might not be a direct activation of its promoter.