Researchers Identify Potential Biomarker For Liver Cancer

The enzyme DMGDH suppresses the metastasis of liver cancer tumors, and could be a potential diagnostic marker of the disease.

AsianScientist (May 27, 2016) – Researchers in China have discovered that the enzyme dimethylglycine dehydrogenase (DMGDH) is down-regulated in both hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) by over 65 percent, according to the expression of 50 pair of normal-tumor tissues evaluated by RNA-seq. HCC is the most common liver cancer in the world. Their work was published in Oncotarget.

According to the research team, led by Professor Li Yixue from the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the mRNA and protein levels in tumors and normal tissue are significantly different, and mRNA can be used as a potential biomarker to distinguish between them.

Further analysis also reveals that important clinical information, including survival, is correlated with DMGDH expression level. Over-expression and knock down of DMGDH promotes the migration, invasion and wound healing ability of HCC cell lines both in vivo and in vitro.

To further evaluate how DMGDH impacts the migration of HCC cells, the transcriptome of DMGDH/GFP over-expression cells was measured via microarrays. Several cancer metastasis-related pathways were identified.

Among them was Akt, a well-known pathway for metastasis; further experiments validated that the phosphorylation levels of Akt 308/473 were lower in presence of DMGDH.

“After over-expression of DMGDH, a lot of genes involved in cancerous pathways was significantly altered, it suggested that the impact of metabolomics on cancer transcriptome is more huge than we thought,” the authors said.



The article can be found at: Liu et al. (2016) Potential Diagnostic and Prognostic Marker Dimethylglycine Dehydrogenase (DMGDH) Suppresses Hepatocellular Carcinoma Metastasis In Vitro and In Vivo.

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Source: Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences; Photo: Shutterstock.
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