To investigate the mechanism responsible for the up-regulation of miR-452-5p in RCC, we predicted 4 potential transcription factors, involving AR, P65 (RELA), HOXD9 and POU2F2, in the promoter region of miR-452-5p using PROMO, and using two miRNA target-predicting algorithms including Target Scan and miTar to narrow the candidates (Fig. 3a). Here, AR is linked to renal cell carcinoma.