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. 2017 Feb 9;8:14344. doi: 10.1038/ncomms14344

Figure 5. Roles of HBB and other anti-oxidants in CTCs and metastasis.

Figure 5

(a) Meta-analysis of HBB expression using multiple publicly available expression datasets showing increased expression of HBB in different metastatic cancers, compared with primary tumours (P=0.019, see Methods). (b) Representative micrograph (× 40) of RNA-in situ hybridization (multimerized oligoprobes, Affymetrix) of a metastatic prostate tumour showing the expression of HBB (red) and the epithelial keratin markers KRT8/18 (blue). The table summarizes the level of HBB expression and the number of primary and metastatic prostate cancer specimens examined. Scale bar, 20 μm. (c) Heat map and box plots showing upregulated expression of HBB and 16 other antioxidant genes in prostate CTCs versus primary tumour. The HBB heatmap uses a different colour scale, since it has a significantly higher number of reads, compared with the other genes. Fold changes and P values for HBB and the overexpressed antioxidant genes are indicated in the box plots.