Abstract: Objective To analyze the effect of SLC4A10 expression on the prognosis of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC)by bioinformatics, and to confirm its expression in HCC tissue and normal tissue. Methods The expression of SLC4A10 in HCC and in normal tissues was analyzed by TCGA database, and verified by real-time quantitative PCR. Kaplan-Meier(K-M) curve was applied to assess survival profile . Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis was applied to address the influence of independent factors on overall survival(OS)and disease free survival (DFS). PPI database was used to construct protein interaction network and function enrichment analysis was used to explore the regulatory mechanism of SLC4A10 in HCC. Results Significantly decreased transcriptional SLC4A10 expression was found in HCC samples. Decreased SLC4A10 mRNA expression was significantly associated with advanced pathological parameters and with shorter OS and DFS in TCGA cohorts. Functional annotations indicated that SLC4A10 was involved in the most significant hallmarks including transepithelial transport, cell volume homeostasis and sodium ion import across plasma membrane. Conclusions The decreased SLC4A10 expression is significantly correlated with aggressive progression and poor survival of HCC patients. These data suggest that SLC4A10 may act as a promising prognostic marker or therapeutic target in HCC.

Key words: hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC), SLC4A10, prognosis, marker