<i>PLEKHA8P1</i> Promotes Tumor Progression and Indicates Poor Prognosis of Liver Cancer
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) records the second-lowest 5-year survival rate despite the avalanche of research into diagnosis and therapy. One of the major obstacles in treatment is chemoresistance to drugs such as 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), making identification and elucidation of chemoresistance regu...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2021-07-01
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| Series: | International Journal of Molecular Sciences |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/14/7614 |
| Summary: | Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) records the second-lowest 5-year survival rate despite the avalanche of research into diagnosis and therapy. One of the major obstacles in treatment is chemoresistance to drugs such as 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), making identification and elucidation of chemoresistance regulators highly valuable. As the regulatory landscape grows to encompass non-coding genes such as long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), a relatively new class of lncRNA has emerged in the form of pseudogene-derived lncRNAs. Through bioinformatics analyses of the TCGA LIHC dataset, we have systematically identified pseudogenes of prognostic value. Initial experimental validation of selected pseudogene-derived lncRNA (<i>PLEKHA8P1</i>) and its parental gene (<i>PLEKHA8</i>), a well-studied transport protein in Golgi complex recently implicated as an oncogene in both colorectal and liver cancer, indicates that the pseudogene/parental gene pair promotes tumor progression and that their dysregulated expression levels affect 5-FU-induced chemoresistance in human HCC cell line FT3-7. Our study has thus confirmed cancer-related functions of <i>PLEKHA8</i>, and laid the groundwork for identification and validation of oncogenic pseudogene-derived lncRNA that shows potential as a novel therapeutic target in circumventing chemoresistance induced by 5-FU. |
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| ISSN: | 1661-6596 1422-0067 |