Lin Qiu , Jian Huang

Key Laboratory of Systems Biomedicine (Ministry of Education), Shanghai Center for Systems Biomedicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, 200240
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Molecular Medical Science, 2020, Vol. 10, No. 4   
Received: 14 Feb., 2020    Accepted: 27 Mar., 2020    Published: 27 Apr., 2020

This article was first published in Genomics and Applied Biology in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common malignant tumors in China. Identifying the genes related to the development of HCC is of great significance for the in-depth study of the pathogenesis of HCC and the development of therapeutic targets. The GEO2R tool was used to screen the differentially expressed genes common to five data sets from the Gene Expression Omnibus Database (GEO). Those differentially expressed genes were potential hepatocellular cancer-related genes. Functional enrichment and signal pathway analysis of differentially expressed genes were carried out by Metascape. The Gene Expression Profiling Interaction Analysis (GEPIA) was used to identify gene closely related to clinical significance of HCC patients. Real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR was used to verify the differentially expressed genes related to the prognosis of liver cancer and to identify the candidate genes related to liver cancer, laying a solid foundation for further research. It was found that A total of 94 differentially expressed genes were shared by the 5 data sets. After literature search, it was found that the relationship between 24 genes and the development of HCC was rarely reported in literature, and they were unknown functional genes in HCC. After analyzing the data in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) with the GEPIA. It was found that GINS1 was highly expressed in liver Cancer tissues and negatively correlated with survival of liver cancer patients. CFHR4 and DNASE1L3 were significantly lower expressed in liver cancer tissues and were positively correlated with survival of liver cancer patients. Real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR confirmed that GINS1 was highly expressed in 81.3% HCC tissues, while CFHR4 and DNASE1L3 were respectively low expressed in 71.9% and 93.8% HCC tissues. Therefore, it was found that GINS1, CFHR4 and DNASE1L3 were significantly differentially expressed in HCC tissues, which are closely associated to the prognosis of HCC patients, and may be used as potential molecular markers to diagnose the prognosis of HCC patients and potential drug targets for the development of HCC treatment.

Hepatocellular carcinoma; Differentially expressed genes; Biomarkers