Figure 4.

Endothelial tip cells exhibit strong TGF-β signaling and are associated with worse prognosis outcome

(A) Quantification of ESM1 expression in 40 OC samples and 10 control specimens using quantitative PCR. Values were represented as the mean ± SD of minus delta CT value between ESM1 and ACTIN. p value = 0.0001, un-pair t test.

(B) Representative immunofluorescence staining images from three OC patient tumor tissues with antibodies against human CD31 and ESM1.

(C) Bubble diagram representation of top 10 significantly enriched GO terms for EC3_Endo_ESM1.

(D) Volcano plot of DEGs in EC3_Endo_ESM1 compared with other endothelial cell sub clusters. The epithelial cell migration genes are labeled.

(E) Mean pathway activity scores of endothelial cell sub cluster.

(F) The Venn diagram shows the intersection of TGF-β signaling pathway genes and DEGs related to epithelial cell migration.

(G) Gene expression levels of TGFB1, PTK2, ITGB1, ACVRL1 and CDH5 in fallopian tube and OC tissues at bulk transcriptome.

(H) Survival analysis with Cox-PH regression model of patients with TCGA-OV grouped by the top10 marker gene of EC3_Endo_ESM1. p values were calculated by Wald test. p value = 0.022.