Iris Publishers- Open access journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology| Understanding the Integrated Gene Regulatory Networks for Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatic cancer is a malignant tumor that begins in the cells of the liver. The leading cause is a viral infection with hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has become the most common form of hepatic cancer. It is the fastest-growing cause of cancer deaths in the United States. HCC is also found to be associated with obesity, type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease. To understand the gene expression regulation during HCC development, scientists have identified a few related transcription factors (TFs) and characterize their roles such as E2F1[1], Foxm1b [2] and hepatic nuclear factors [3]. However, these findings still cannot fully explain the underlying molecular mechanism during liver tumorigenesis. It is necessary to systematically study the global gene regulatory network (GRN) during HCC development.
The advancement of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies has enabled the rapid examination of the entire human genome. Many NGS applications have been developed to profile cells such as RNA-seq [4], ChIP-seq [5], ATAC-seq [6] etc. These allow scientists to study cells at different levels including genome, transcriptome, and epigenome. For instance, ChIP-seq and ATAC-seq data can be used to learn the chromatin states of certain biological processes by detecting regulatory elements in the genome and corresponding transcriptional regulators. Furthermore, recent developments in high-throughput single-cell technology provide the statistical power to study diverse population of tumor cells. This can greatly help scientists to understand intratumoral heterogeneity.

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