Snapshot liver transcriptome in hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract

Lately, advances in high throughput technologies in biomedical research have led to a dramatic increase in the accessibility of molecular insights at different levels of cancer biology such as genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome, and others. Among the diverse biological layers, the transcriptome has been most extensively studied especially due to the successful and broad introduction of the microarray technology. The future prospect of broad disposability of deep sequencing technology will furthermore lead to a more sensitive detection of lowly expressed transcripts and to an increase in the number of newly identified transcripts, but also to increase the discovery and characterization of alternative splicing. A common goal of large scale transcriptome profiling methods is the stratification of patients, eventually leading to personalized prognostic predictions and therapeutic strategies. Also, the observation that diverse etiologies of the mostly underlying liver cirrhosis (alcohol, HBV, HCV a.o.) are represented by different transcriptome profiles may be valuable for the identification of essential tumor targets [3] .I n