ULK1 and cancer: Due to the swift advancement of next-generation sequencing, the utilization of pan-cancer investigation has become prevalent in the detection of molecular indicators within tumors, such as aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH; Xia et al., 2023), Unc-51 Like Autophagy Activating Kinase 1 (ULK1; Qu et al., 2020) and N6-methyladenine-related genes (Qu et al., 2021a).