Study On The Function Of E2F3 In Regulating Gene Expression In Liver Cancer Cell Lines

E2F3 is an important transcription factor, previous studies have found that deregulation of its expression is closely correlated with tumorigenesis and development of many human cancers. In this study, E2F3 was overexpressed in SMMC-7721 and Hep G2 cell lines by transfection and gene expression array hybridization was employed to analyze the effect of E2F3 overexpression on the gene expression profiles. Our data showed that 2231 and 483 genes were upregulated or downregulated in SMMC-7721 and HepG2 cell lines respectively, 167 genes were common in these two cell lines. The relative expression level of twelve genes were selected for validation using relative quantitative real-time PCR. The results proved that XAF1, CEACAM1, STAT1, ATF3, TNFSF10 genes were significantly upregulated in both cell lines; JUN,CLDN1,EGR1 genes were significantly upregulated only in SMMC-7721 cells while KLF6,TAP1 genes were significantly upregulated only in HepG2 cells. Functional classification of differentially expressed genes retrieved several clusters including genes groups invlolved in transcriptional regulation, apoptosis, and cell cycle progression. Our study demonstrated that E2F3 regulates the expression of many genes and suggests that overexpression of E2F3 may induce apoptosis. This has accumulated evidences for further study on the biological function of E2F3 in the oncogenesis and progression of liver cancer.