Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most heterogeneous malignant cancers with no effective targets and treatments. However, the molecular pathogenesis of HCC remains largely uncertain. The aims of our study were to find crucial genes involved in HCC through multidimensional methods and revealed potential molecular mechanisms. Here, we reported the gene expression profile GSE121248 findings from 70 HCC and 37 adjacent normal tissues, all of which had chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, we were seeking to identify the dysregulated pathways, crucial genes and therapeutic targets implicated in HBV-associated HCC. We found 164 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) (92 downregulated genes and 72 upregulated genes). Gene ontology (GO) analysis of DEGs revealed significant functional enrichment of mitotic nuclear division, cell division, and the epoxygenase P450 pathway. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analysis showed that the DEGs were mainly enriched in metabolism, cell cycle regulation and the p53 signaling pathway. The Mcode plugin was calculated to construct a module complex of DEGs, and the module was mainly enriched in cell cycle checkpoints, RHO GTPase effectors and cytochrome P450. Considering a weak contribution of each gene, gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was performed, revealing results consistent with those described above. Six crucial proteins were selected based on the degree of centrality, including NDC80, ESR1, ZWINT, NCAPG, ENO3 and CENPF. Real-time quantitative PCR analysis validated the six crucial genes had the same expression trend as predicted. Furthermore, the methylation data of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) with HCC showed that mRNA expression of crucial genes was negatively correlated with methylation levels of their promoter region. The overall survival reflected that high expression of NDC80, CENPF, ZWINT, and NCAPG significantly predicted poor prognosis, whereas ESR1 high expression exhibited a favorable prognosis. The identification of the crucial genes and pathways would contribute to the development of novel molecular targets and biomarker-driven treatments for HCC.
Highlights
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the sixth most frequent malignant cancer and the fourth-leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide (Bray et al, 2018)
Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) annotation analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in HCC revealed that the pathway mainly including retinol metabolism (P = 4.21E-05), drug metabolism-cytochrome P450 (P = 5.95E-05), cell cycle (P = 2.44E-04), and the p53 signaling pathway (P = 5.59E-04) (Fig. 2A)
The results revealed that NDC80, ZWINT, NCAPG and CENPF were significantly upregulated in HCC, and ESR1 and ENO3 were downregulated in HCC (Fig. 4)
Summary
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the sixth most frequent malignant cancer and the fourth-leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide (Bray et al, 2018). Patients with hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), alcohol consumption and aflatoxin exposure exhibit an increased risk of liver cancer (El-Serag, 2002). Tumorigenesis is largely ascribed to genetic changes, including structure variations, genetic copy number variants, single nucleotide variants and small insertions and deletions (Lengauer, Kinzler & Vogelstein, 1998). Liver transplantation and sorafenib have prolonged the survival of HCC patients, high postoperative recurrence and drug resistance remain risk factors that confer a worse prognosis (Wang et al, 2015).
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