Background and Aim: Genes related to the circadian rhythm control vari-ous biological processes. The aim of this study was to comprehensively in-vestigate the mutational and mRNA profile of core circadian rhythm genes in hepatocellular cancer (HCC) samples.
Material and Methods: In this study, the gene profile of a total of 369 patients with HCC was examined over the data obtained from the cancer genome atlas database through-cBioPortal. The effects of mutations on protein were examined by scoring the Polymorphism Phenotyping v2, Mu-tation Assessor, and SIFT-databases. While the association of genes with other genes was determined with the GeneMANIA-database, the associa-tion of expression levels in the genes with overall survival (OS) was evalu-ated with the Kaplan–Meier Plot database.
Results: As a result of the analyses, there were a total of 25 mutations. De-creased expression levels of PER1 (1.3e-05), PER3 (p=0.046), and CRY2 (p=1.8e-06) genes were found statistically associated with shorter OS. It was also found that increased expression levels of the PER2 (p=0.045) gene were associated with longer OS, and increased expression levels of the NPAS2 (p=9e-04) gene were associated with shorter OS.
Conclusion: In particular, changes in the PER1, PER2, CRY2, and NPAS2 genes may provide possible molecular targets in chemotherapy and im-munotherapy for HCC patients.