Abstract
Despite studying the various molecular mechanisms of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), effective drugs and biomarkers in HCC therapy are still scarce. The present study was designed to investigate dysregulated pathways, novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets for HCC. The gene expression dataset of GSE14520, which included 362 tumor and their paired non-tumor tissues of HCC, was extracted for processing by the Robust multi-array average (RMA) algorithm in the R environment. SAM methods were leveraged to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Functional analysis of DEGs was performed using DAVID. The GeneMania and Cytohubba were used to construct the PPI network. To avoid individual bias, GSEA and survival analysis were employed to verify the results. The results of these analyses indicated that separation of sister chromatids was the most aberrant phase in the progression of HCC, and the most frequently involved genes, EZH2, GINS1, TPX2, CENPF, and BUB1B, require further study to be used as drug targets or biomarkers in diagnosis and treatment of HCC.