is a novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarker in hepatocellular carcinoma.

BACKGROUND

GDP Dissociation inhibitor 2 () gene has been correlated with some important biological processes in a variety of cancers, whereas the role of in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is ill-defined. We aimed to demonstrate the relationship between and HCC based on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data mining.

METHODS

The expression of was compared between cancer and normal tissues of 371 HCC patients collected from TCGA-LIHC, and verified in HCC cell lines. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was applied to annotate biological function of . Furthermore, Wilcoxon rank sum test, Logistics regression, as well as Cox regression and Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, were employed to evaluate the association of expression with clinicopathological characteristics, and survival status of HCC patients, respectively.

RESULTS

It showed that the expression of was much higher in tumor tissues than in normal tissues ( < 0.001) of HCC patients. And the elevated expression of was correlated with more aggressive HCC tumor status, including severe primary tumor extent, advanced pathological stage, serious histologic grade, and mutated TP53 status ( < 0.05). Moreover, high expression was strongly associated with a poor survival rate ( < 0.001). Both enrichment and immune infiltration analyses implied that -associated signaling mainly involve lipid metabolism and extracellular matrix (ECM) constructing pathways related to tumor microenvironment (TME) ( < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

The elevated expression of predicts poor prognosis in HCC patients, indicating that could be applied as a predictive biomarker for diagnosis and prognosis of HCC.