Prognostic and predictive value of the hypoxia-associated long non-coding RNA signature in hepatocellular carcinoma.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common cancer worldwide. Hypoxia is an important feature of solid tumors, including HCC, and is also an important factor involved in malignancy progression. However, the identification of hypoxia-related long non-coding RNA (lncRNAs) and their prognostic value in HCC have not been systematically investigated.

Prognostic and predictive value of a DNA methylation-driven transcriptional signature in hepatocellular carcinoma.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide. DNA methylation alterations are frequently observed in malignant tumours and play critical roles in the development of cancers, including HCC. To provide novel clinical prognosis biomarkers for HCC patients, we first performed a comprehensive analysis and identified a collection of prognosis-associated genes with DNA methylation-driven expression dysregulation in HCCs.

Aberrant high expression level of MORC2 is a common character in multiple cancers.

Microrchidia 2 (MORC2) plays important roles in DNA damage repair and lipogenesis, but the clinical and functional role of MORC2 in cancer remains largely unexplored. In this study, we showed that MORC2 was widely expressed in human tissues while significantly up-regulated in most cancer types using immunohistochemical staining and analysis of messenger RNA expression profile of more than 2000 human tissue samples from 15 different organs (lung, prostate, liver, breast, brain, stomach, colon/rectum, pancreas, ovary, endometrium, skin, nasopharynx, kidney, esophagus, and bladder). We also found that the MORC2 expression level in high-grade cancer tissues was much more elevated and associated with unfavorable pathological characteristics, poor overall survival, and disease-free survival in several kinds of cancers such as non-small cell lung cancer and breast cancer.

[Research advances on medical genetics in China in 2015].

Steady progress has been achieved in the medical genetics in China in 2015, as numerous original researches were published in the world's leading journals. Chinese scientists have made significant contributions to various fields of medical genetics, such as pathogenicity of rare diseases, predisposition of common diseases, somatic mutations of cancer, new technologies and methods, disease-related microRNAs (miRNAs), disease-related long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), disease-related competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs), disease-related RNA splicing and molecular evolution. In these fields, Chinese scientists have gradually formed the tendency, from common variants to rare variants, from single omic analyses to multipleomics integration analyses, from genetic discovery to functional confirmation, from basic research to clinical application.