To explore the potential roles of the Dock-C subgroup GEFs (Dock6, Dock7 and Dock8) in GC, we first investigated their mRNA expression in 8 GC cohorts (n > 10) from the Oncomine database (www.oncomine.org), and the results indicated that Dock6 was the most up-regulated gene (Additional file 2: Table S1). This evidence concerns the gene DOCK7 and gastric cancer.