piR-823 demonstrates tumor oncogenic activity in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma through DNA methylation induction via DNA methyltransferase 3B.

Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) dysregulation occurs frequently in extensive cancers. However, there was no report about piRNA expression in esophageal cancer (EC). In this study, the expression levels of piR-823 and DNMT1, DNMT3A, DNMT3B were detected in 54 pairs of ESCC tissues and adjacent normal tissues using the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction method. Pearson's chi-squared test and receiver operating characteristic curves were established to evaluate the diagnostic and prognostic value of piR-823 in ESCC. Spearman's correlation analysis was used to evaluate the association between piR-823 and DNMTs. We found that piR-823 was significantly upregulated in ESCC tissues compared with matched normal tissues (P = 0.0213), the level of piR-823 was significantly associated with lymph node metastasis (P = 0.042). The ROC curve analysis of piR-823 expression level yielded an area under the ROC curve value of 0.713 (P = 0.0001). DNMT3B was upregulated in ESCC tissues compared with matched normal tissues (P = 0.0286). There was an obvious positive correlation between piR-823 and DNMT3B expression (r = 0.6420, P < 0.0001). In conclusion, for the first time, we provided evidence about piRNA expression in EC. piRNA-823 and DNMT3B were both upregulated in ESCC and positively correlated with each other, suggesting the tumor oncogenic role of piR-823 in ESCC to epigenetically induce aberrant DNA methylation through DNMT3B. In addition, piRNA-823 showed high specificity in detecting ESCC and higher piRNA-823 level indicated higher risk of lymph node metastasis, suggesting its diagnostic and prognostic biomarker potential.