Large-scale sequencing analysis of the full-length cDNA library of human hepatocellular carcinoma.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the human cancers clearly linked to viral infections. Although the major risk factors for HCC development have been elucidated, the hepatocellular carcinogenesis pathway resulting in malignant transformation of liver cells remains to be clarified. Recently, some results of microarray and comparative genomic hybridization analysis have been provided as comprehensive studies of genomic instability in HCC, including mutation, deletion and DNA copy losses. In this work, the full-length cDNA library has been constructed and sequenced, and the sequencing results have been further clustered and analyzed. The results show that 1,342 genes have been found, and about 300 of these genes may be important in e.g. cell proliferation, DNA repair and apoptosis. After further analysis of DNA sequences, the deletion genotypes of at least 24 genes have been found. However, the functional changes of these deletion mutants and their significance in hepatocellular carcinogenesis remain to be clarified. This research may be one of the best to obtain the candidate genes for hepatocellular carcinogenesis.