Clinical Significance of METTL Family Molecules in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Objective: to search for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in tumor subdivision from different aspects, such as transcripts, proteins, gene mutations, protein interactions, signal pathways and functions. To explore the correlation between METTL1-6 protein family and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and to determine whether METTL family proteins are valuable as potential biomarkers for tumor progression and prognosis of HCC. Methods: We try to use data collection technique to extract the data needed in medical analysis. The correlation between the MRNA expression level of METTL family proteins and the prognosis of HCC patients was obtained from TCGA data. METTL data and clinical data of protein METTL family in tissue samples of HCC patients were obtained from Kaplan-Meier Plotter database for correlation analysis. The immunohistochemical data of METTL family protein 1, 2A, 2B, 3, 4, 5, 6 in normal liver tissue and HCC tissue were obtained from TIMER database. The protein network of METTL proteome was obtained by using STRING database, and the heat map enrichment analysis of proteome interaction between KEGG and GO was done by software. Results: 6 of the 7 METTL protein members were highly expressed in HCC tissues, and were positively correlated with the grade and clinical analysis of HCC tumors.