Down-regulation of miR-133a-3p in hepatocellular carcinoma tissues and its potential regulatory molecular mechanism: a study of qRT-PCR and bioinformatics analysis

MicroRNAs have recently been discovered to be of great importance in regulating biological processes including proliferation differentiation, apoptosis necrosis and invasion. Here, we aimed to verify the clinical implication of miR-133a-3p in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and to explore the underlying regulatory molecular mechanism. Clinical HCC samples (n=95) were enrolled in the present study. The expression of miR-133a-3p was detected by RT-qPCR and its associations with clinicopathological parameters were further analyzed. We next utilized 14 online prediction databases to seek the potential target genes of miR-133a-3p in HCC. The overlapping genes were further evaluated through bioinformatics methods including Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), PANTHER and protein-protein interaction network (PPI). We discovered that the expression of miR-133a-3p in HCC was obviously lower than that in non-HCC liver tissues (P<0.001). Besides, the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis exhibited the Area Under Curve (AUC) was 0.683. Additionally, the expression of miR-133a-3p also showed statistical correlation with tumor nodes, metastasis, portal vein tumor embolus and vascular invasion (all P<0.05). GO analysis displayed three items, including regulation of cell proliferation, plasma membrane part, protein kinase activity, which were predominant respectively in biological process (BP), cellular component (CC), molecular function (MF). Through PPI, we also achieved 30 hub genes which were the key target genes of miR-133a-3p in HCC. The information we obtained here might offer new perspectives in clinical diagnosis and elucidate part of regulatory molecular mechanism of miR-133-3p in HCC.