Fig. 2. SLC13A2 expression is decreased in human HCC specimens and cell lines, which is consistent with the findings in animal models.

(A and B) RNA-seq dataset analysis of human HCC and paracancerous specimens (GSE193567). Shown are ontology enrichment [(A), left], heatmap of SLC transporters for TCA intermediates [(A), right], volcano plot highlighting SLC13A2 [(B), left], and SLC13A2 expression in tumor versus para-tumor tissues [(B), right]. (C) Spatial transcriptomics data from the SpatialTME portal and single-cell RNA-seq data from HCCDB showing SLC13A2 expression and distribution in tumor and nontumor tissues, with purple intensity indicating expression level. Tumor regions are outlined by white dashed lines. (D) SLC13A2 expression in the dataset of TCGA-LIHC. (E) SLC13A2 expression in GEO datasets (GSE14323, GSE60502 and GSE14520). (F) Kaplan-Meier survival analysis of male patients with HCC stratified by high or low SLC13A2 expression. (G) SLC13A2 expression in human HCC cell lines versus normal hepatocytes THLE-2 cells after being split and cultured for 48 hours. (H and I) SLC13A2 expression in eight clinical HCC patients. C, cancerous; PC, paracancerous. (J) Representative IHC staining of SLC13A2 in human HCC samples and adjacent nontumor tissue. The data are presented as means ± SEM. *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01, two-tailed unpaired Student’s t test. FPKM, fragments per kilobase of transcript per million mapped reads; OS, overall survival.