ISG20 promotes local tumor immunity and contributes to poor survival in human glioma

Gao, Mengqi; Lin, Yi; Liu, Xing; Li, Yiming; Zhang, Chuanbao; Wang, Zheng; Wang, Zhiliang; Wang, Yulin; Guo, Zongze

To further explore the connection of ISG20 and immunity in the local tumor microenvironment, we performed gene set variation analysis (GSVA) and analyzed the enrichment scores of various immune cell-characterized gene sets in ISG20-associated genes. We found that as the ISG20 expression level increases, the numbers of macrophages and neutrophils that infiltrates the tumor also rise, while the numbers of central memory T cells (Tcm), follicular helper T cells (Tfh), effector memory T cells (Tem), and gamma delta T cells (Tgd) decreased ( Figure 5(a); Fig. S4A ). However, NK cells, CD4 + T cells, and CD8 + T cells were not correlated with ISG20 expression. Mutual relationship analysis of ISG20related immune cells was further conducted to identify their clusters according to the extent of ISG20 expression ( Figure 5 (b), Fig. S4B ), demonstrating that macrophages and neutrophils were tightly correlated, both of which were positively correlated with ISG20 expression; while subsets of T cells were correlated with each other, and were negatively correlated with ISG20 levels.