As we found that obese women have a favorable prognosis in the development of HCC, we wondered whether the female estrogen receptor and the transcription factor ESR1 are involved in the activation of MMAA. As we found that MMAA was upregulated with the increase in ESR1 expression (Supplementary Figure S9), we first conducted a chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assay to determine whether ESR1 could bind with the consensus ESR1 binding element. Here, ESR1 is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.