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Decreased Expression of UK114 Is Related to the Differentiation Status of Human Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Divisions of ¹ Molecular and Genomic Medicine ² Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Research, National Health Research Institutes, Miaoli, Taiwan, People's Republic of China; ³ Institute of Microbiology and Immunology, National Yang-Ming University; ⁴ Department of Surgery, Taipei Veterans General Hospital; ⁵ Graduate Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University; ⁶ Department of General Education, National Taipei College of Nursing, Taipei, Taiwan, People's Republic of China; and ⁷ Department of Life Science, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, People's Republic of China

Requests for reprints: Mong-Liang Chen, Division of Molecular and Genomic Medicine, National Health Research Institutes, 35, Keyan Road, Zhunan Town, Miaoli County 350, Taiwan, People's Republic of China. Phone: 886-37-246-166, ext. 35306; Fax: 886-37-586-463. E-mail: superstar{at}nhri.org.tw

Previous studies have identified that the expression of UK114 is tissue specific and the protein has been found to be most abundant in liver and kidney. However, the expression of UK114 in human hepatocellular carcinoma and its relationship to differentiation and transformation of hepatocellular carcinoma have not been studied. In this study, the expression of UK114 in human hepatocellular carcinoma was examined by Northern and Western blot analyses. We found that UK114 was significantly down-regulated in most of hepatocellular carcinoma tissues compared with adjacent nontumor tissues (72.7%) at both mRNA and protein levels. We looked into the possibility that this decreased expression of UK114 in the hepatocellular carcinoma tissues may play a role in the differentiation or tumorigenicity of hepatocellular carcinoma. Immunohistochemical staining showed that the reduced expression of UK114 in hepatocellular carcinoma tissues was correlated with the tumor differentiation status as graded by the Edmondson-Steiner classification. On the other hand, overexpression of UK114 was not able to suppress the proliferation of human hepatoma cells and tumorigenicity in nude mice. These results suggest that UK114 does not seem to act as a tumor suppressor gene; however, it may useful as a biomarker that will assist in the grading of the differentiation status of hepatocellular carcinoma samples. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008;17(3):535–42)

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				Cancer Epidemiol. Biomarkers Prev., October 1, 2008; 17(10): 2901 - 2901. [Full Text] [PDF]