ELK1 and gastric cancer: RIP assays demonstrated that more ELK1 mRNA was enriched after miR-139-3p over-expression treatment compared with control treatment, suggesting that miR-139-3p could interact with ELK1 (Fig. 7B). The ELK1 expression is dramatically higher in TGCA paired and unpaired RNAseq database (Fig. 7C), subsequent qRT-PCR confirmed that the expression level of ELK1 mRNA in the tumorous tissues of 128 GC patients was noticeably higher than that in the correspondent adjacent noncancerous tissues (Fig. 7D).