Plays a Carcinogenic Role in Hepatocellular Carcinoma and is related to the regulation of .

Exonuclease 1 (), a member of the RAD2 nuclease family, was first described as possessing 5' to 3' nuclease activity and 5' structure-specific endonuclease activity. Here, we show that is significantly upregulated in HCC tumor tissues and that high expression is significantly correlated with liver cirrhosis. We further demonstrate that knockdown decreases proliferation and colony forming abilities of HCC cells and tumorigenicity , as well as decreases migration and invasive capabilities of HCC cells. Alternatively, overexpression significantly increases the proliferation, colony forming ability, and migration and invasive capabilities of HCC cells . Additionally, we truncated a region upstream of the transcription start site (TSS) of and used the region with the strongest transcriptional activity to predict that the transcription factor can bind to the promoter. Bioinformatics analysis found that was positively correlated with and luciferase reporter assays and RT-PCR confirmed that could enhance the transcriptional activity of . CCK-8 assays showed that depletion of further reduces cell proliferation ability after knocking down of . Taken together, our findings indicate that acts as an oncogene in HCC and its expression level is related to activity.