Patient samples and cell lines

Total 110 paired HCC fresh tissues consist of tumors and adjacent normal samples were obtained from patients who underwent liver resection at the Liver Transplantation Center in The First Affiliate Hospital of Nanjing Medical University between October 2012 and November 2013. Approved by our Institutional Ethics Committee, all patients in our study offered their informed consent to take part in our study prior to surgery. All fresh tissues were collected and frozen in liquid nitrogen within 10 min. The diagnosis of all patients were histopathologically confirmed and the clinical characteristics of all patients are summarized in Table 1. The HepG2, SNU423, SMMC-7721, Hep3B, 97H, 97 L, Huh7 human hepatoma cell lines and the human normal L02 cell line used in this study were obtained from KeyGen (Nanjing KeyGen Biotech Co., Ltd, Jiangsu, China). All of the cells were cultured in DMEM medium (Gibco, New York, CA, USA) pre-treated with 10% fetal bovine serum, 80 U/ml of penicillin sodium at 37 °C in humidified air containing 5% carbon dioxide.