WD repeat domain 6 (WDR6), a novel human WD-repeat gene, encodes a member of the WD repeat protein family, and its tumorigenic effect has rarely been reported so far.
Our study used Oncomine, TIMER2.0, GEPIA2, Kaplan-Meier plotter, PrognoScan, and TISIDB tools to analyze the differential expression between pan-cancer, especially lung cancer, and corresponding normal tissue, and further explore the prognostic and immunological role of WDR6 expression.
Our results showed WDR6 was lower expressed in lung squamous cell carcinoma than in normal tissue, but WDR6 expression was correlated obviously with clinical stage in Lung adenocarcinoma. The overall survival, first progression, postprogression survival, and Relapse-free survival of lung cancer patients were longer in the WDR6 high-expression group than in the low-expression group. We found the expression of WDR6 significantly correlated with immune molecules, including immunomodulators, lymphocytes, and chemokines in lung cancer.
WDR6 can be used as a prognostic marker for lung cancer and is significantly associated with immune cell infiltration.

As an ancient protein family, the WD40 repeat proteins often play essential roles in fundamental cellular processes in eukaryotes. Although investigations of eukaryotic WD40 proteins have been frequently reported, prokaryotic ones remain largely uncharacterized. In this paper, we report a systematic analysis of prokaryotic WD40 proteins and detailed comparisons with eukaryotic ones. About 4,000 prokaryotic WD40 proteins have been identified, accounting for 6.5% of all WD40s. While their abundances are less than 0.1% in most prokaryotes, they are enriched in certain species from Cyanobacteria and Planctomycetes, and participate in various functions such as prokaryotic signal transduction and nutrient synthesis. Comparisons show that a higher proportion of prokaryotic WD40s tend to contain multiple WD40 domains and a large number of hydrogen bond networks. The observation that prokaryotic WD40 proteins tend to show high internal sequence identity suggests that a substantial proportion of them (~20%) should be formed by recent or young repeat duplication events. Further studies demonstrate that the very young WD40 proteins, i.e., Highly-Repetitive WD40s, should be of higher stability. Our results have presented a catalogue of prokaryotic WD40 proteins, and have shed light on their evolutionary origins.