Fig. 6

Clinical relevance of the miR-192-Rictor-p53-miR-192 axis in human HCCs. A mRNA expression levels of MiR-192 by qPCR in American (n = 26) and Chinese (n = 32) patient cohorts. Comparisons were made between human background liver (BL) tissues and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues. B mRNA expression levels of Rictor in human HCCs and their corresponding BL tissues by qPCR in the two cohorts (n = 12 each). Photodensity of the BL tissue in each tissue pair was set to 1. C Rictor protein expression levels in human HCC (T: tumor) and corresponding background liver (B: background) tissues were measured by western blotting and quantified by densitometric analysis. #, shorter exposure; Δ, longer exposure. D Kaplan–Meier curves demonstrate overall survival (OS) between the high Rictor/low miR-192 group and the high miR-192/low Rictor group in HCC patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database (n = 376). Statistical significance of the correlation between miRNA/mRNA expression and OS was determined by the log-rank test (P < 0.05). E mRNA expression levels of MiR-192 and Rictor in HCC vs. BL patients based on TCGA data. BL: adjacent background liver. F Correlationo of Rictor or miR-192 expression levels with clinicopathologic characteristics, including clinical stage (stage I + II vs. stage III + IV) and histological grade (G1 + G2 vs. G3 + G4). BL: adjacent background liver. G Enrichment plots from gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA). All with normalized P < 0.01. *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ns no significant