Osteosarcoma is the most common malignant bone tumor in clinic (Marko et al., 2016), which is mostly seen in children and adolescents. Although surgery combined with neoadjuvant chemotherapy significantly improves the 5-year survival rate of patients with local tumors (Yang et al., 2018), most patients with osteosarcoma will metastasize, and the 5-year survival rate of patients with metastatic osteosarcoma is only 20 ∼ 30% (Murakami et al., 2017). At present, osteosarcoma is still the second leading cause of cancer-related death in adolescents (Chen et al., 2020). Considering the complex intra - and inter tumor heterogeneity, a suitable specific target for osteosarcoma has not been found. However, based on previous studies on the heterogeneity of other tumors, the immune microenvironment may have relatively low heterogeneity and become a more appropriate direction of intervention (Koirala et al., 2016). Therefore, identifying genes related to osteosarcoma immune microenvironment may provide a robust and effective target for clinical application (Mirabello et al., 2020).

According to the age at which osteosarcoma occurs suddenly increases with the onset of puberty, and its largest growth site is shown to be related to the rapid proliferation of bones, it indicates that osteosarcoma is significantly related to the rapid growth of bones (Ho et al., 2017). At the same time, exposure to alkylating agents may also promote the development of osteosarcoma (Zhang et al., 2021). In addition, radiotherapy is one of the few identified environmental risk factors for osteosarcoma. Studies have shown that increasing the radiation dose of primary cancer is linearly related to the risk of secondary osteosarcoma. Another study based on American adults also found that radiotherapy is significantly associated with an increased risk of osteosarcoma diagnosis in the future (Wu et al., 2012).

Whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing analysis of the germline DNA of patients with osteosarcoma showed that the prevalence of pathogenic variants in genes associated with known cancer susceptibility syndromes was higher than expected (Gianferante et al., 2017). Chromosomal abnormalities, pathogenic variants of tumor suppressor genes, transcription factors and growth factors, and abnormalities of WWOX and miRNA all play an important role in the occurrence and development of osteosarcoma (Lin et al., 2017). The frequency of osteosarcoma in individuals with mutations in the RB1 gene is higher than that in the population. Studies have shown that there is an interaction between primary inheritance and genes in the pathogenesis of the disease (Spritz, 2007). A 2016 study found that among individuals with pathogenic mutations in the germline tumor suppressor gene TP53, the cumulative incidence of osteosarcoma reached 5–11% (Mai et al., 2016). Transforming growth factor β (TGF-β) protein affects cell growth and metabolism, and the expression of TGF-β1 is significantly increased in highly malignant osteosarcoma. Insulin growth factors IGF-I and IGF-II can bind to the corresponding receptors to play a role, and they are overexpressed in osteosarcoma. The overexpression of CCN3 in osteosarcoma is related to its poor prognosis. Parathyroid hormone (PTH), parathyroid hormone related peptide (PTHrP) and parathyroid hormone receptor (PTHR1) have been shown to be related to the progression and metastasis of osteosarcoma (Berdiaki et al., 2010). Various molecular changes and genomes closely related to the occurrence and progress of osteosarcoma have been identified. These changes include gene amplification, deletion and germline mutation, overexpression and RTK activation, abnormal cell proliferation, metastasis, apoptosis, drug tolerance genes and miRNAs (Saraf et al., 2018). Osteosarcoma is characterized by complex and unbalanced karyotypes and abnormal gene expression profiles. Abnormalities of chromosome structure and value can be detected in most osteosarcoma (Isakoff et al., 2015). Common chromosome numerical abnormalities include germline mutation, deletion, polyploidy, aneuploidy, duplication and unbalanced ectopic errors (Morrow and Khanna, 2015). TP53 tumor gene and retinoblastoma tumor suppressor gene RB1 are the most prominent genes of germline mutation (Oliveira et al., 2005). They are the key detection sites of mitosis and the root cause of chromosome instability. Most osteosarcoma contains inactivation of both p53 and Rb pathways (Levine and Fleischli, 2000). In essence, the main causes of osteosarcoma are the inactivation of tumor suppressor gene expression and the abnormal doubling of oncogenes (Orr and Compton, 2013). Common oncogenes, such as avian cell homolog Myc, purine / pyrimidine exonuclease 1 (APEX1), action associated vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGFA) and RecQ protein analog 4 (RecQL4). These amplified genes are closely related to the biological processes of osteosarcoma cell proliferation, growth and angiogenesis. Liu et al. (2019) identified 125 genes which are related to osteosarcoma and can be used to predict survival of osteosarcoma. Deng et al. (2021) used univariate, Lasso, and machine learning algorithm-iterative Lasso Cox regression analyses to predict survival of osteosarcoma by lncRNAs.

At present, there are two common biological methods for discovering disease-related genes. First, collect disease samples and health samples, respectively, conduct RNA-seq sequencing to obtain the expression of genes in different health states, and then obtain the genes significantly differentially expressed in disease and health populations through differential expression analysis (Zhao et al., 2021b). Second, through genome-wide association analysis, collect a large number of disease and healthy people, sequence the whole genome, and then compare the sequences to obtain sites with significant differences in mutation frequency (Peng and Zhao, 2020; Zhao et al., 2020c). However, both of them need a large number of samples to support in order to ensure the accuracy, which results in a large consumption of time and money (Bhakta and Tsukahara, 2020). With the continuous accumulation of biological data and the continuous improvement of calculation methods, bioinformatics experts find biological laws through calculation methods, and then infer more biological conclusions (Chen et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2020a). The calculation methods have identified disease-related genes and drugs on a large scale (Tianyi et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2020b). Although some conclusions are not completely accurate, they greatly reduce the scope of research and save time and money (Wu et al., 2021). Moreover, the models constructed by deep learning and machine learning can be used for reference by other research problems (Zhao et al., 2021a). Therefore, we developed a machine learning method to identify osteosarcoma-related genes in this paper. Using the idea of random forest for reference, we fused multiple Extreme Learning Machines (ELM) to build a model through the known osteosarcoma related genes to predict more genes potentially associated with osteosarcoma.

Whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing analysis of the germline DNA of patients with osteosarcoma showed that the prevalence of pathogenic variants in genes associated with known cancer susceptibility syndromes was higher than expected. Osteosarcoma is highly aggressive and progresses rapidly. In all age groups, as many as 25% of patients have metastasized at the time of diagnosis, so its early diagnosis is necessary for the long-term prognosis of patients. At present, the diagnosis of osteosarcoma is still based on the patient’s clinical manifestations, imaging examinations and biopsy. Gene therapy includes tumor suppressor gene therapy, antisense gene therapy, suicide gene therapy and combined gene therapy. Although the research of gene therapy has made great progress and it has good therapeutic prospects, the clinical application of gene therapy still has a long way to go. In recent years, with continuous research on the key genes of osteosarcoma, its application value as a gene therapy target has gradually revealed.

To identify osteosarcoma-related genes in large scale, in this paper, we developed an ELM-based method for identifying osteosarcoma-related genes. 100 ELM models have been constructed to build a final RELM model. By constantly randomly selecting negative sets, we performed five times of 10-cross validation. The accuracy of RELM is stable and high in all experiments.

Overall, we purposed a reliable method for identifying osteosarcoma-related genes in large-scale. This method could help understand the pathogenesis of osteosarcoma and develop drug targets.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found below: gene-disease associations: https://www.disgenet.org/ and gene interaction: http://www.inetbio.org/humannet.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

ZZ, JS, and FY conceived and designed this study. ZZ, JS, GZ, YG, and ZJ analyzed the data. ZZ, JS, and GZ wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.