Figure 3.

E-cad^LO Cells Are Similar to Human Mesenchymal Tumor Cells

(A) From a published dataset (Onder et al., 2008), the expression level in human mammary epithelial cells (HMLE) of the human orthologs of the mouse E-cad^LO gene set in Figure 2B was retrieved. Differential expression levels per gene as the deviation of the median across all experiments are shown.

(B) The image shows an E-cad⁺ human invasive ductal carcinoma, and the graph shows the percentage of E-cad^HI and E-cad^LO cells (n = 4 tumors). Scale bar, 20 μm.

(C) From published RNA-seq experiments of human breast cancer CTCs (Yu et al., 2013), the relative expression levels of human-mouse orthologs were retrieved. Plots show the average differential expression found in the Yu et al. (2013) dataset for the E-cad^LO-upregulated (red bars) or non-upregulated genes (black bars). Expression levels for circulating cells were determined for blood draws from ten healthy donors (left two bars), four blood draws from one patient with CTCs with an epithelial phenotype (middle two bars), and one of the same patient with CTCs with a mesenchymal phenotype (right two bars).