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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 1|pp 70—79

MACC1-AS1 promotes hepatocellular carcinoma cell invasion and proliferation by regulating PAX8

Hui Tong1, Xiaohui Liu2, Tao Li1, Weihua Qiu1, Chenghong Peng1, Baiyong Shen1, Zhecheng Zhu1
  • 1Department of General Surgery, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai 200025, China
  • 2CNRS-LIA124, Sino-French Research Center for Life Sciences and Genomics, State Key Laboratory of Medical Genomics, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai 200025, China
* Co-first authors
Received: September 5, 2019Accepted: November 26, 2019Published: January 8, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102585

Copyright: © 2020 Tong et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Long noncoding RNAs play vital roles in several biological processes, including cell growth and embryonic development. We showed that MACC1-AS1 was overexpressed in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells and tissues. The MACC1-AS1 expression level was dramatically upregulated in HCC samples compared to adjacent normal samples, and 77.5% (31 of 40) of HCC samples showed overexpression of MACC1-AS1. Ectopic MACC1-AS1 expression enhanced cell proliferation and cyclin D1 expression in both SMMC7721 and MHCC-97H cells. Ectopic expression of MACC1-AS1 promoted vimentin, N-cadherin and snail expression and decreased E-cadherin expression in both SMMC7721 and MHCC-97H cells. MACC1-AS1 overexpression also induced cell invasion in the same two cell lines. Furthermore, MACC1-AS1 overexpression enhanced PAX8 expression in HCC cells. The PAX8 level was dramatically increased in HCC samples compared to adjacent normal samples, and 75% (30 of 40) of HCC samples showed overexpression of PAX8. PAX8 expression was positively correlated with MACC1-AS1 expression in HCC samples. MACC1-AS1 overexpression promoted HCC cell proliferation, EMT and invasion through regulating PAX8. These results suggest that MACC1-AS1 acts as an oncogene in the development of HCC.