Expression of miR-520c in intestinal type gastric adenocarcinoma

MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that participate in post-transcriptional gene regulation in cells thereby playing active role in pathological conditions and have been nominated as new class of biomarkers in disease including cancer. miR-520c has been reported as potential oncogenic micro-RNA in several previous studies. Gastric cancer is the most common cancer of digestive tract and the fourth prevalent cancer worldwide with the intestinal-type gastric adenocarcinoma (IGA) the dominant type of gastric malignancies. This study aimed to explore miR-520c putative role, in IGA and patient's clinicopathological features. Total RNA was first extracted from 42 pairs of IGA tissues and relevant non-tumorous adjacent tissues. cDNA was synthesized from extracted RNAs using specific primers for miR-520c. The level of miR-520c was quantified using SYBER Green Real-Time PCR master mix. The relationship between miR-520c expression and clinicopathological features were examined. Our study resulted in no differential expression of miR-520c in IGA. There was no significant correlation between miR-520c expression and clinicopathological features including tumor grade, genus and age groups. To our knowledge, this is the first report about exploring miR-520c expression in IGA tissue samples. Our results do not verify miR-520c previously established oncogenic role in IGA.