Frontiers in Bioscience-Scholar (FBS) is published by IMR Press from Volume 13 Issue 1 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
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To investigate genetic mechanisms of hepatocarcinogenesis and identify potential anticancer targets in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), we analyzed microarray gene expression profiles between 33 HCCs and their corresponding noncancerous liver tissues. Functional analysis of differentially-expressed genes in HCC indicated that cell cycle dysregulation plays an important role in hepatocarcinogenesis. Based on 14 differentially-expressed genes involved in cell cycle in HCC, we applied Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to establish a potential genetic network which could assist understanding of HCC molecular mechanisms. siRNA-mediated knock-down of two significantly up-regulated genes, minichromosome maintenance protein 2 (MCM2) and cyclin B1 (CCNB1), in HCC cells (SMMC-7721 and QGY-7703) induced G2/M-phase arrest, apoptosis and antiproliferation in HCC. Some up-regulated cell cycle-related genes in HCC were down-regulated following specific depletion of MCM2 or/and CCNB1 in HCC cells, which might well validate and complement the reconstructed cell cycle network. This study may contribute to further disclose hepatocarcinogenesis mechanism through systematically analyzed the HCC-related-cell-cycle pathway. This study also shows that MCM2 and CCNB1 could be promising prognostic and therapeutic targets for HCC.