Abstract: Objective: To investigate the expression of FENDRR, a long non-coding RNA gene, in colorectal cancer tissue and to detect the correlation of FENDRR expression with prognosis of colorectal cancer, and to explore the correlation between FENDRR and E-cadherin as well as N-cadherin. Methods: A total of 90 pairs of colorectal cancer tissue and matched para-carcinoma tissue samples were collected.The expression of FENDRR was detected by real time fluorescencequantitative polymerase chain reaction(rtfq-PCR). Western blotting analysis was used to detect the expression of E-cadherin and N-cadherin protein in colorectal cancer,and their correlations with FENDRR were analyzed. Results: The expression of FENDRR was decreased in cancer tissue (8.29±0.13) in relative to their corresponding para-cancer tissue(8.59±0.18), and the difference was statistically significant (t=13.666, P<0.01). E-cadherin was negatively correlated with N-cadherinin colorectal cancer tissue r=-0.584, P<0.01）; FENDRR expression was positively correlated with E-cadherin(r=0.778, P<0.01) and negatively correlated with N-cadherin protein (r=-0.692, P<0.01). The overall survival time of colorectal cancer patients with high FENDRR expression was higher than that of patients with low FENDRR expression (90.0 months vs 49.5 months, P=0.041). Conclusions: FENDRR shows an inhibiting effect on development of colorectal cancer, and has certain relationship with E-cadherin and N-cadherin.FENDRR might exert its inhibitory effect on metastasis by influencing the epithelial-mesenchymal transition(EMT) process. Detection of FENDRR might be useful for predicting the prognosis of colorectal cancer.

Key words: Colorectal cancer, Long non-coding RNA, FOXF1 adjacent non-coding developmental regulatory RNA, Prognosis