MAPK8 and hepatocellular carcinoma: Of note, the enhancement of JNK activation as implicated in the phosphorylation of the JNK largely occurred in the nuclei of the hepatocytes (top panels in Fig. 1A) and was not uniformly distributed in the whole HCC tissue in the majority of tissue slides, but rather, clustered in certain limited areas, especially in those areas featured with small foci of necrosis (Fig. 1B).