Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a standout amongst the most widely recognized cancers around the world, and just as the alcoholic liver disease it is also progressed by extreme viral hepatitis B or C. At the early stage of the disease, numerous patients are asymptomatic consequently late diagnosis of HCC occurs resulting in expensive surgical resection or transplantation. On the basis of the alpha fetoprotein (AFP) estimation, combined with the ultrasound and other sensitive imaging techniques used, the non-invasive detection systems are available. For early disease diagnosis and its use in the effective treatment of HCC patients, the identification of HCC biomarkers has provided a breakthrough utilizing the molecular genetics and proteomics. In the current article, most recent reports on the protein biomarkers of HBV or HCV-related HCC and their co-evolutionary association with liver cancer are reviewed.

Plastic pollution is a worldwide concern endangering both fossil fuel resources and the environment through rise in their production and usage. Bioplastics emerged as a suitable replacement and proved more environment friendly than traditional plastics. Among bioplastics, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) proved to be in demand due to their promising properties such as high rate of biodegradability. Three key genes (phaA, phaB, and phaC) are involved in the biosynthesis of PHA. An analysis based on bioinformatics approaches was performed in this study to analyze these key genes and their translated proteins in potential PHA producing microorganisms found on the Gen-solution database. The sequences (DNA and Protein) obtained from PHA producing microorganisms were analyzed in MEGA X to check their evolutionary history. The arrangement of genes was highly diverse. The PHA biosynthetic genes belonging to Proteobacteria showed promising phylogenetic relationship and the occurrence and their distribution in these organisms suggested that a single gene cluster related to PHA might have been segmented in the form of small groups of genes and got transferred among various organisms. The results indicated that the gene and protein sequences were not fully conserved suggesting that the genes had undergone addition, deletion or replacement of nucleotides resulting in gene rearrangement. However, the function of the proteins remained fully conserved suggesting that the protein function had the highest level of conservation and the gene sequences had the least level of conservation according to this study. Overall, the results were a strong indicative that horizontal gene transfer had a strong influence on the distribution and molecular evolution of these PHA biosynthetic genes.