Ngal Gene Expression Changes In Hepatocellular Carcinoma And Its Function

Hepatocellular carcinomas (HCC) is one of high-frequency malignancy, therefore it has great significance to explore valuable biomarker for HCC and study the mechanism of HCC progression. NGAL(neutrophil gelatinase associated lipocalin) gene is a new member of Lipocalin family, exhibiting high homology with mouse oncogene 24p3 and is closely related to the function of MMP-9. NGAL is expressed abnormally in all kinds of carcinomas, such as breast cancer and esophageal carinomas and is correlated with the carinomasS development, metastasis and prognosis, which implies that NGAL gene may have potential application in the carinomasn early diagnosis and prognosis prediction. However, the study of NGAL in HCC is very limited. In consideration of this, the thesis expected to discover new biomarkers of HCC through the study of NGAL expression in pairs of Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues and the association between its expression and HCC pathological diagnosis, and reveal the possible mechanisms of NGAL in the HCC progression.The expression level of NGAL in 53 pairs of HCC tissues was measured via Realtime PCR method. The results indicated that NGAL was high expressed in 37 HCC tissues, accounting for 69.81% of the total samples. X2 test analysis indicated that no significant correlation between NGAL expression and HCC pathological diagnosis. NGAL was well-distributed in cytoplasm and nucleolus observed by Fluorescence microscope, which verified that NGAL was a excretion protein. Cell cycle experiment showed that overexpression of NGAL in SMCC-7721 is able to promote the cell from G1 to S phase, and the S phase is significant increased (p<0.05), which suggested that NGAL may play a role in hepatoma carcinoma cell growth. Also, Apoptosis experiment showed that overexpression of NGAL had the anti-apoptosis effect in SMCC-7721 under serum starvation(p<0.05).This thesis discovered that NGAL was significantly high expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma tissues, and investigated its possible function in carcinoma cell growth promotion and apoptosis suppression, which provides valuable evidence for advancely understanding NGALisrolein HCC.