NOD2 and neoplasm: Compared to the matched adjacent non-tumor (ANT) liver tissues, NOD2 expression was increased in 67.5% (54/80) of HCC samples (Fig. 1a), which was confirmed in the analysis of an HCC cohort using TCGA database and in the analysis of two cohorts (GSE124535, GSE121248) from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gds) datasets (Fig. 1b).