The First Multiomics Association Study of Trace Element and Mineral Concentration and RNA Sequencing Profiles in Human Cancers

Integration of various types of omics data is an important trend in contemporary molecular oncology. In this regard, high-throughput analysis of trace and essential elements in cancer biosamples is an emerging field that has not yet been sufficiently addressed. For the first time, we simultaneously obtained gene expression profiles (RNA sequencing) and essential and trace element profiles (inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry) for a set of human cancer samples. The biosamples were formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded primary tumor tissue blocks: 67 for colorectal cancer patients and 18 for other solid cancer types (16 types). Mass spectrometry profiles were obtained for 45 chemical elements: Ag, Al, As, Au, B, Ba, Be, Bi, Ca, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Ga, Ge, Hg, I, K, La, Li, Mg, Mn, Mo, Na, Ni, P, Pb, Pd, Pt, Rb, Sb, Sc, Se, Si, Sn, Sr, Te, Ti, Tl, Zn, U, V, W, and Zr. The expression levels were profiled for 36,596 known human genes, and the activation levels were assessed for 10,520 human intracellular molecular pathways. For the concentrations of essential elements Ca, Cu, Fe, K, Mg, Na, P, and Zn we detected statistically significant correlations on both gene expression and pathway activation levels for both colorectal cancer samples and at the pan-cancer level. In total, 222/137, 122/220, 1/0, 239/186, 71/44, 1/0, 354/294, 69/82 gene/pathway biomarkers were detected for Ca, Cu, Fe, K, Mg, Na, P, and Zn, respectively. We believe that this first-in-class database provided here will be valuable for multiomics cancer research.