Background: Secretory carrier membrane proteins 3 (SCAMP3 ) is an endocytosis-associated protein involved in regulating endosomal pathways and the trafficking of vital signaling receptors. This study aimed to comprehensively assess the role of SCAMP3  in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) by integrated bioinformatics analysis.
Methods: In this study, bioinformatics databases were used to explore the differential expression status and prognostic value of SCAMP3 gene in HCC, and bioinformatics analyses of survival data and interactors of SCAMP3 were conducted to predict the prognostic value of SCAMP3 in HCC.
Results: Using the TCGA data, our data shows that SCAMP3  mRNA expression is most significantly different between liver and hepatocellular carcinoma tissues and higher expression of SCAMP3  has unfavorable prognostic significance in HCC. Tumor grade, stage, and gender also showed a significant relevance with SCAMP3  expression. High SCAMP3  expression of males revealed significantly poorer survival and progression compared with low SCAMP3  expression of males. BioGRID statistics explores 79 unique interactions with SCAMP3 and multiple post translational modifications. Further analysis finds that SOCS2 may negatively correlate with SCAMP3, while GBA, MX1, and DDOST positively correlate with SCAMP3. Moreover, ncRNA analysis shows that SCAMP3  gene expression is positively associated with lncRNA SBF2-AS1 and negatively related with Has-miR-145. The expressions of SBF2-AS1 and Has-miR-145 are also significantly related with survival in HCC.
Discussion: SCAMP3 expression can be affected by multiple genes or ncRNAs expression that are associated with survival, thus suggesting that SCAMP3 can be used as a clinical diagnosis and prognostic biomarker in HCC.
Keywords: SCAMP3, hepatocellular carcinoma, prognosis, interaction, ncRNA, Kaplan–Meier plotter