Does the Sex-Determining Region on the Y Chromosome (SRY) Correlate with Gender Disparity in Liver Disease?

Excerpt

We read with interest the article by Xue et al. entitled “Sex-determination gene SRY potentially associates with poor prognosis but not sex bias in hepatocellular carcinoma” [1]. In this study, the authors investigated SRY protein level in six hepatoma cell lines and 76 human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues. Compared with normal liver cells, expression of SRY was higher in hepatoma cells. Consistently, SRY was significantly upregulated in HCC compared to adjacent normal liver tissues. High expression of SRY in nucleus of HCC cells and high expression of SRY in tumor adjacent normal liver tissues correlates with poor overall and disease-free survival after radical hepatectomy. Additionally, the authors demonstrated that knockdown of SRY inhibited the malignant properties of HCC cells, while forced overexpression of SRY enhanced the malignant characteristics of HCC cells. Interestingly, the authors found a similar proportion of SRY activation in HCCs of males and females, therefore, they deduced that SRY seemed not to be correlated with sex bias in HCC. …