HOXC10 overexpression promotes cell proliferation and migration in gastric cancer.

Homeodomain‑containing gene 10 (HOXC10) is a member of the homeobox transcription factors that plays an important role in the development of multicellular organisms. HOXC10 is overexpressed in a variety of human cancers, and recent studies have revealed that HOXC10 is upregulated in gastric cancer as well. However, its mechanism of action is not fully understood, thus, the role of HOXC10 was investigated in the present study in human gastric cancer. First, HOXC10 expression was revealed to be significantly increased in gastric cancer tissues compared to normal tissues (TCGA dataset), and HOXC10 upregulation was associated with decreased recurrence‑free survival in gastric cancer patients in a public gene expression dataset. HOXC10 promoted cell proliferation and metastasis in two gastric cancer cell lines (AGS and MKN74). Analyzing TCGA 450K DNA methylation dataset, it was revealed that HOXC10 CpG sites were hypomethylated in gastric cancer tissues. Bisulfite sequencing revealed that CpG sites in the HOXC10 first intronic region were hypomethylated in three gastric cancer tissues, and HOXC10 expression was increased in gastric cancer cell lines (AGS and SNU620) in response to 5‑azacytidine treatment. By RNA‑sequencing of AGS cells with ectopic HOXC10 expression, it was revealed that many genes were upregulated by HOXC10 overexpression. Among them, CST1 was predicted to be a HOXC10 direct target gene via prediction of HOXC10 binding sites from the JASPAR database. A chromatin immunoprecipitation assay revealed that HOXC10 directly bound to CST1 promoter regions. The present study proposes HOXC10 is a potential prognostic marker or therapeutic target in human gastric cancer.