First multiomics association study of trace element concentration and RNA sequencing profiles in human cancers

The integration of various types of omics data is an important trend of 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 RNA sequencing gene expression and mass spectrometry essential and trace element profiles 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 different solid cancer types. Mass spectrometry profiles were obtained for 45 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, Zr. The expression levels were profiled for 36596 known human genes, and the activation levels were assessed for 10520 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, both for colorectal cancer and for pan-cancer level of data analysis. We hope the first-in-class database provided here will be a valuable resource for multiomics cancer research.