Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC) is a major global health concern, ranking as the sixth most common cancer and the fourth leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, highlighting the urgent need to develop reliable diagnostic tools, biomarkers, and therapeutic targets to improve early detection and reduce mortality; KAT2A, a histone lysine acetyltransferase, plays crucial roles in multiple biological processes including chromatin remodeling, transcriptional regulation, cell cycle control, and apoptosis initiation, yet its specific role in the initiation and progression of hepatocellular carcinoma remains poorly understood; in this study, we assessed KAT2A expression levels in liver hepatocellular carcinoma tissues using data from the TCGA database and further analyzed its association with immune cell infiltration through single-cell data analysis, followed by evaluating the relationship between KAT2A and patient prognosis using Kaplan–Meier survival analysis combined with Cox regression modeling, while also exploring its potential biological functions via Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analyses, and finally validating the impact of KAT2A on the proliferation and migration of hepatocellular carcinoma cells through in vitro experiments; our findings revealed that KAT2A is significantly upregulated in LIHC tissues and plays a key role in promoting the proliferation and migration of LIHC cells, suggesting that KAT2A may serve as a novel prognostic biomarker and a promising therapeutic target for immunotherapy in hepatocellular carcinoma.