Wenrong Liu: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Ruiping Huai: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Yin Zhang: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Shuquan Rao: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Lili Xiong: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Ruofan Ding: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Canquan Mao: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Wenqing Zhao: Department of Medical Oncology, Datong Second People's Hospital, Datong, Shanxi, People's Republic of China.
Tao Hao: Department of Medical Oncology, Datong Second People's Hospital, Datong, Shanxi, People's Republic of China.
Qingqing Huang: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Zhiyun Guo: School of Life Sciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People's Republic of China. zhiyunguo@gmail.com. ORCID
BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the leading cause of cancer mortality and without effective prognosis. Previous study has been confirmed that the abnormal expression of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) TGFB2-AS1 was involved in tumorigenesis. However, the biological functions of TGFB2-AS1 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remain largely unclear. OBJECTIVE: We comprehensively assess the clinical significance of TGFB2-AS1 and investigate the biological functions of TGFB2-AS1 on HCC HepG2 cells. METHODS: We firstly confirmed the expression of TGFB2-AS1 between tumor and normal tissues using public available transcriptome data. We analyzed the clinical significance of TGFB2-AS1 using the TCGA HCC datasets. The biological functions of TGFB2-AS1 on HCC HepG2 cells were explored by multiple in vitro assays. RESULTS: We found that TGFB2-AS1 was remarkably increased in HCC tissues (P = 0.00148) and exhibited a potential predictive marker for HCC, with an area under curve (AUC) of 0.708 (P = 0.0034) using the fifty pairs of matched HCC tissues of TCGA. Besides, higher expression of TGFB2-AS1 in HCC tissues was identified as being positively associated with advanced tumor (P = 0.012) and disease stage (P = 0.009) in 355 HCC cases using independent sample nonparametric test. Downregulation of TGFB2-AS1 expression significantly restrained proliferation (P < 0.01) and impaired colony formation (P < 0.05). Furthermore, TGFB2-AS1 depletion remarkably promoted the apoptosis of HepG2 cells (P < 0.05) and inhibited migration and invasion (P < 0.01). CONCLUSION: Taken together, these findings suggested that TGFB2-AS1 might serve as a potential therapeutic target for HCC.
