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Downregulation of TRIM21 contributes to hepatocellular carcinoma carcinogenesis and indicates poor prognosis of cancers

  • Research Article
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Tumor Biology

Abstract

The aim of our work is to clarify the clinical implication and functional role of tripartite motif 21 (TRIM21) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). We validated that TRIM21 was downregulated in liver cancer samples by immunohistochemical (IHC) staining. We also demonstrated that its downregulation was associated with several clinicopathologic features such as tumor numbers, T stage, Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) stage, and Cancer of the Liver Italian Program (CLIP) stage of HCC patients. Importantly, the expression of TRIM21 in tumor samples is significantly correlated with the prognosis of the patients. We further silenced TRIM21 in HCC cell HepG2 and LM3 and confirmed that TRIM21 silencing will promote cancer cell proliferation (CCK-8 assay), colony forming (plate colony-forming assay), migration (transwell assay), and the ability of antiapoptosis (annexin V-FITC/PI staining) in vitro. Then, we predicted gene sets influenced by TRIM21 by using bioinformatic tools. For the first time, we prove that TRIM21 is a potential tumor suppressor in HCC and its low expression indicates poor prognosis. Our findings provide useful insight into the mechanism of HCC origin and progression and offer clues to novel HCC therapies.

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Acknowledgments

The first author would thank Liu Can from College of Chinese Language and Literature, Wuhan University for her kind encouragement. The authors also would like to thank Dr. Wang Bicheng and Dr. Zeng Zhi for the technical help on pathology. The study was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81272963 and No. 81172350).

Authors’ contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: QD, HY.

Performed the experiments: QD, DH, HL, XW.

Contributed funds/reagents/materials: KH, GX, HY.

Wrote the paper: QD, QZ, MT, JD.

All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interest.

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Author notes

    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Department of Gastroenterology, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430060, China

      Qianshan Ding & Jinfen Dai

    2. Department of Oncology, The Central Hospital of Enshi Autonomous of Prefecture, Enshi Clinical College of Wuhan University, Enshi, 445000, China

      Du He

    3. Department of General Surgery, The Second People’s Hospital of Guangdong Province, Southern Medical University, Xingang Central Road 446, Haizhu District, Guangzhou, 510515, Guangdong Province, China

      Ke He & Guoan Xiang

    4. Department of Immunology, School of Basic Medicine, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430071, China

      Qian Zhang & Meng Tang

    5. Central Laboratory, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan Unviersity, Wuhan, 430060, China

      Hanlin Lv & Xiaochen Wang

    6. Department of Gastroenterology, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Institute for Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Wuhan University, Jiefang Road 238, Wuhan, 430060, Hubei Province, China

      Honggang Yu

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    1. Qianshan Ding
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    Correspondence to Guoan Xiang or Honggang Yu.

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    Ding Qianshan and He Du contributed equally to this work.

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    Ding, Q., He, D., He, K. et al. Downregulation of TRIM21 contributes to hepatocellular carcinoma carcinogenesis and indicates poor prognosis of cancers. Tumor Biol. 36, 8761–8772 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13277-015-3572-2

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    • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13277-015-3572-2

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