Hepatocellular carcinoma is a common
tumor with a high fatality rate worldwide, and exploring its pathogenesis and deterioration mechanism is a focus for many researchers. Increasing evidence has shown that
miRNAs are involved in the occurrence and progression of a variety of
cancers, including
hepatocellular carcinoma. Therefore, this study mainly aimed identify key
miRNAs related to
hepatocellular carcinoma and explore their potential functions and clinical significance. In this study, we performed
miRNA sequencing on three pairs of
hepatocellular carcinoma tissue samples and screened 26 differentially expressed
miRNAs. Then 2 key
miRNAs (miR-139-5p and miR-582-3p) were screened by Kaplan-Meier curve analysis, Cox multivariate analysis and qPCR methods. The expression of miR-582-3p was positively correlated with clinicopathological parameters in patients with
hepatocellular carcinoma. Subsequently, miRwalk and starbase were used to predict the target genes of key
miRNAs, and then the key pairs miR-582-3p/SMAD2 identified by WGCNA, PPI, qPCR and Pearson correlation analysis. Finally, a dual
luciferase experiment, the rescue-of-function experiment and qPCR confirmed that miR-582-3p directly targets SMAD2 and regulates the proliferation, migration and invasion of HepG2 cells by targeting SMAD2. At the same time, interference with SMAD2 can influence the effect of miR-582-3p on HepG2 cells. In conclusion, our findings confirm that miR-582-3p is an independent factor for the prognosis of
hepatocellular carcinoma patients, and can regulate the progression of
hepatocellular carcinoma cells by targeting SMAD2.