AGXT and hepatocellular carcinoma: To investigate whether altered AGXT expression affects the stemness characteristics of the HCC cells, we knocked down AGXT expression by using short hairpin RNA (shRNA) in the Huh7 and Hep3B cells, and exogenously upregulated AGXT expression in the MHCC-97H and PLC/PRF/5 cells (Figure 2C).