CircRNA-104718 acts as competing endogenous RNA and promotes hepatocellular carcinoma progression through microRNA-218-5p/TXNDC5 signaling pathway

This study aims at investigating the role of circRNA-104718 in HCC progression, which has been observed to be significantly up-regulated in HCC tissues. We found that, higher expression of circRNA-104718 also led to a poor prognosis in HCC patients. Using luciferase binding assays and RNA immunoprecipitation studies, we identified circRNA-104718 is physically associated and co-expressed with microRNA-218-5p in HCC. Mechanistically, we demonstrated that circRNA-104718 functions as a competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs) and competes with thioredoxin domain-containing protein 5 (TXNDC5) mRNA and directly binds to miR-218-5p. Functionally, we found that ectopically expressed circRNA-104718 accelerated cell proliferation, migration, invasion, and inhibited apoptosis. In vivo studies on a nude mice model showed that circRNA overexpression could increase the tumor size and the rate of metastasis. Silencing of circRNA-104718 could decrease both the tumor size and metastasis significantly. Conversely, we also observed overexpression of miR-218-5p could in turn decrease the proliferation, migration, invasion, and increase apoptosis. Furthermore, circRNA-104718 could relieve the suppression of miR-218-5p target TXNDC5 and thereby cause an inhibition of miR's functions. In summary, our results indicate that circRNA-104718 acts as a ceRNA and promotes HCC progression through the targeting of miR-218-5p/TXNDC5 signaling pathway. Thus, we propose that circRNA-104718 would be a promising tar...
Source: Clinical Science - Category: Biomedical Science Authors: Tags: PublishAheadOfPrint Source Type: research