MTERF3 and hepatocellular carcinoma: We further evaluated the correlation between MTERF3 expression and clinical follow-up by Kaplan-Meier analysis and log-rank test (https://kmplot.com/analysis/), and the results showed that evaluated expression of MTERF3 mRNA was associated with unfavorable overall survival (P = 0.0007), relapse-free survival (P = 0.046) and progression-free survival (P = 0.045) in the TCGA HCC cohort (Fig. 1h and Supplementary Fig. 1c, d).