Exploring the underlying mechanism of autophagy in liver cancer cells under hypoxia based on RNA sequencing

We established cell models of hypoxia, and the number of autophagic vacuoles was observed by electron microscopy. Autophagy associated proteins and invasion were evaluated. RNA sequencing was used to identify DEmRNAs and DEmiRNAs to study the mechanism of hypoxia-induced autophagy in liver cancer cells. Results: We found that hypoxia might promote liver cancer cell invasion by inducing autophagy. In addition, a total of 407 shared DEmRNAs and 57 shared DEmiRNAs were identified in both HCCLM3 autophagy group and SMMC-7721 autophagy group compared with normal controls. Furthermore, 278 DEmRNAs were identified cancer autophagy-specific DEmRNAs and 24 DEmiRNAs were identified cancer autophagy-specific DEmRNA and DEmiRNAs. Finally, we obtained 19 DEmiRNAs with high degree based on the DEmiRNA-DEmRNA interaction network. Among them, hsa-miR-483-5p, hsa-miR-4739, has-miR-214-3p and has-miR-296-5p may be potential gene signatures related to liver cancer autophagy. Overall design: HCCLM3, SMMC-7721 and LX2 cells were used as the research objects, and they were divided into autophagy group and control group. Total RNA was extracted from cells using TRIzol reagent (Life Technologies, CA, USA) according to the manufacturer's protocol. Spectrophotometric and agarose gel electrophoresis was used to evaluate the quality and quantity of total RNA. Illumina Hiseq Xten platform (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA) was performed to conduct sequencing of mRNA.