MTERF3 and hepatocellular carcinoma: To assess the role of MTERF3 in HCC progression, we analyzed the expression of MTERF3 in TCGA cohort and CPTAC cohort using the online database (http://ualcan.path.uab.edu/index.html), and the results showed that both mRNA and protein of MTERF3 were significantly increased in HCC samples as compared with adjacent normal liver tissue samples (P < 0.001, Fig. 1a, b).