Background & objective: The authors' previous study suggested there could be metastasis suppressor gene for liver cancer on human chromosome 8p. TEY1 was a newly discovered metastasis suppressor gene for prostate cancer located on human chromosome 8p. In order to explore whether TEY1 gene could be a metastasis suppressor gene for liver cancer, the expression of TEY1 was quantitated in liver cancer cell strains with different metastatic potential.
Methods: RNA was extracted from liver cancer cell strains, MHCC97-H, MHCC97-L, and HCCLM3, and normal liver cell line L02. The first strand cDNA was synthesized by reverse transcription, which was then used as the template to perform fluorescent quantitative polymerase chain reaction (FQ-PCR). The quantity of the expression of TEY1 gene was normalized by dividing with that of the housekeeping gene, GAPDH for each sample. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed for the normalized values.
Results: The normalized initial cDNA concentrations of TEY1 in MHCC97-H, MHCC97-L, HCCLM3, and L02 were (3.57+/-2.62) x 10(-4), (5.02+/-1.95) x 10(-4), (2.82+/-0.78) x 10(-5), and (15.20+/-0.58) x 10(-4), respectively. The expression level of TEY1 in L02 was significantly different from those of liver cancer strains (P< 0.001). The expression level of TEY1 in HCCLM3 was also significantly different from those in MHCC97-H and MHCC97-L (P< 0.05). But there was no significant difference between MHCC97-H and MHCC97-L although the expression level of TEY1 gene in MHCC97-L was 1.4 times higher than that in MHCC97-H.
Conclusion: The expression levels of TEY1 gene in liver cancer cells were negatively correlated with their different metastatic potentials; it could be conjectured that TEY1 may possibly be a metastasis suppressor gene for liver cancer.