ZFPM2 and hepatocellular carcinoma: To solidly verify that miR-653 was a target of ZFPM2-AS1, we next performed luciferase reporter assays, and the results demonstrated that miR-653 mimics dramatically depressed the luciferase activities in HCC cells when co-transfected with luciferase reporter vectors containing ZFPM2-AS1 wt but not ZFPM2-AS1 mut sequences (Fig. 6I).