Screening the genome for HCC-specific CpG methylation signatures as biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis evaluation

BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common and invasive malignant tumors in the world. The change in DNA methylation is a key event in HCC. METHODS: Methylation datasets for HCC and 17 other types of cancer were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The CpG sites with large differences in methylation between tumor tissues and paracancerous tissues were identified. We used the HCC methylation dataset downloaded from the TCGA as the training set and removed the overlapping sites among all cancer datasets to ensure that only CpG sites specific to HCC remained. Logistic regression analysis was performed to select specific biomarkers that can be used to diagnose HCC, and two datasets—GSE157341 and GSE54503—downloaded from GEO as validation sets were used to validate our model. We also used a Cox regression model to select CpG sites related to patient prognosis. RESULTS: We identified 6 HCC-specific methylated CpG sites as biomarkers for HCC diagnosis. In the training set, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) for the model containing all these sites was 0.971. The AUCs were 0.8802 and 0.9711 for the two validation sets from the GEO database. In addition, 3 other CpG sites were analyzed and used to create a risk scoring model for patient prognosis and survival prediction. CONCLUSIONS: Through the analysis of HCC methylation datasets from the TCGA and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases, potential biomarkers for HCC diagnosis and prognosis evaluation were ascertained. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12920-021-01015-9.