CDCA7 serves as a novel prognostic marker in human hepatocellular carcinoma.

Abstract

c-Myc oncogene plays an important role in tumorigenesis, cell division cycle associated 7 (CDCA7), recently found that it is a direct target gene of c-Myc, is upregulated in many tumors, but its role in tumor progression is still poorly understood. CDCA7 expression and prognosis were analyzed in hepatocellular carcinoma using TIMER2.0 and Kaplan-Meier databases, while genomic changes were studied using cbioportal. LinkedOmics identified relevant genes and WebGestalt analyzed the associated pathways. Protein interaction networks were explored using the STRING database, and the core PPI network was analyzed with the MCODE plugin of Cytoscape. CDCA7 expression was detected in 30 paired HCC specimens by real-time PCR, and its effect on HCC cell proliferation was determined in vitro. CDCA7 expression was frequently up-regulated in human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and its expression was positively correlated with prognosis. The TIMER2.0 database showed that CDCA7 was differentially expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma, with high expression in tumor tissues and low expression in normal tissues. The Kaplan-Meier database shows that high CDCA7 expression has a worse prognosis. The cBioportal database showed that the genomic change rate of CDCA7 in hepatocellular carcinoma was 2.15%, including mutations, amplifications, and deep deletions. Pathway analysis of related genes showed that CDCA7-related genes were mainly focused on cell division-related pathways. The experimental results also validate our study. CDCA7 could contribute to HCC progression and raise the possibility that CDCA7 is a potential new therapeutic target for HCC treatment.