YAP1 and hepatocellular carcinoma: To further investigate the molecular mechanism by which miR-199a-3p inhibited proliferation and promoted apoptosis in HCC cells, publicly available databases (DIANA, TargetScan and PicTar) were searched for the targets of miR-199a-3p, and YAP1 was a potential target of miR-199a-3p based on the putative target sequence at 249–255 base pairs of the YAP1 3’UTR (Fig. 3a).