Supplementary material from "Germ cell tumour subtypes display differential expression of microRNA371a-3p"

Testicular germ cell tumours (TGCTs) are a heterogeneous group of neoplasms, mostly affecting young men. Curability rates are high and adequate treatment relies on careful and accurate pathological and clinical assessment. Indeed, TGCTs histopathological subtyping is critical for adequate therapeutic decision. Considering limitation of currently available serum biomarkers, novel candidates have been proposed, most notably miR-371a-3p, which outperformed classical serum markers, but no detailed information concerning TGCTs subtype was available. Thus, we carried out evaluation of miR-371a-3p expression levels among TGCTs subtypes using a consecutive cohort of tissue samples. MiR-371a-3p discriminated TGCTs from control tissues with high sensitivity and specificity (AUC = 0.99). Furthermore, seminomas displayed higher miR-371a-3p expression levels compared to non-seminomatous TGCTs, which also disclosed significant differences among them. Nonetheless, prepubertal TGCTs depicted lower miR-371a-3p expression levels than postpubertal TGCTs. Globally, miR-371a-3p expression levels decreased in parallel with progressive cell differentiation. We concluded that miR-371a-3p is TGCTs-specific and it might be clinically useful for early detection and disease monitoring.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Frontiers in epigenetic chemical biology’.