Identification of GINS2 prognostic potential and involvement in immune cell infiltration in hepatocellular carcinoma.

: has been reported to have prognostic value in several solid tumors other than hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and its influence on tumor immunity has not been investigated thus far. : The transcriptome profiles were retrieved from two public databases, GEO and TCGA. The median expression was considered as cutoff to define and groups and to obtain differentially expressed genes. These genes were then subjected to KEGG pathway and gene ontology (GO) analysis and to gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA). Survival analyses according to level were performed utilizing Kaplan-Meier plotter. TIMER database was adopted to investigate associations between level and infiltrating immunocytes, and the correlation between immunocyte-related gene expression and level was evaluated via GEPIA database. A 236-patient validation cohort were applied to confirm the bioinformatic results of TCGA and TIMER database. : is augmented in tumorous tissues of HCC patients compared with nontumor specimens, and GINS2-overexpressed patients have poorer overall survival (OS) and disease-specific survival (DSS) than those with low GINS2 expression in HCC ( = 0.009 and = 0.002 respectively). Cell cycle and DNA replication were two main processes that enriched in tumor cells overexpressed gene (NES = 1.848, = 0.007; and NES = 1.907, = 0.005, respectively). Moreover, correlates positively with markers of activated CD8 and CD4 T cells, as well as exhausted T lymphocytes. : HCC patients overexpressed have poorer prognoses than those with low expression, possibly as a result of the function of in cell cycle and DNA replication as well the exhaustion of T lymphocytes.