Spliceosome-associated factor CTNNBL1 promotes proliferation and invasion in ovarian cancer.

Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecologic malignancy and the molecular pathogenesis of high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma has not been completely characterized. Numerous studies have shown that altered splicing patterns and splicing factors were found to contribute to tumor development and progression. In this study, we demonstrated that spliceosome-associated factor CTNNBL1 was significantly upregulated in high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma, the elevated level of CTNNBL1 indicates poor prognosis in patients with high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma. Functional characterization revealed that CTNNBL1 promoted the proliferation and invasion of ovarian cancer cells in vitro. Furthermore, through transcriptome analysis, we found CTNNBL1 regulates multiple splicing events and gene expression in ovarian cancer cells. Importantly, we identified IFI16 and FOXM1 splicing was regulated by CTNNBL1. To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring the expression, functional roles and regulated splicing events of CTNNBL1 in ovarian cancer.