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Background  Metastasis is the main cause of death in patients with advanced stage colon cancer. Epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays an important role in invasion and metastasis. Actin-like 6A (ACTL6A) is vital for embryogenesis and differentiation and is also critical for metastasis and EMT in hepatocellular carcinoma, as observed in our previous study. In the present study, we further explored the role of ACTL6A in colon cancer metastasis.    Methods  ACTL6A expression levels were analyzed in normal colon, colon adenoma and colon cancer specimens using public databases and tissue samples. ACTL6A expression and its association with clinicopathologic features of colon cancer patients were also analyzed. ACTL6A-overexpression and ACTL6A-knockdown colon cancer cells were used to perform cytological experiments to explore the potential biological function of ACTL6A in metastasis and EMT in colon cancer.    Results  The data from both the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and Oncomine databases showed that ACTL6A expression levels in colon adenoma and cancer were higher than those in normal colon samples. The ACTL6A expression level in fresh colon cancer specimens was also higher than that in the corresponding adjacent normal colon specimens. Patients with high ACTL6A expression directly correlated with advanced pT status, distant metastasis, poor differentiation and microvascular/perineural invasion. ACTL6A overexpression promoted migration and invasion of colon cancer cells, whereas ACTL6A knockdown exhibited the opposite effect in vitro. Moreover, we demonstrated that ACTL6A promoted EMT in colon cancer cells in vitro.    Conclusions  Our findings indicate that ACTL6A exhibits pro-tumor function and acts as an EMT activator in colon cancer. ACTL6A may serve as a potential therapeutic target for colon cancer.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (10.1186/s12885-018-4931-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

ACTL6A expression promotes invasion, metastasis and epithelial mesenchymal transition of colon cancer