Figure 2.

(a) Methylation status of LC3A in 5 lung cancer cell lines and HBEC. Bisulfite sequencing (BS) showed a heterogeneous methylation pattern in the promoter region and exon 4 of the LC3A gene in lung cancer cell lines. White: unmethylated; grey: partially methylated or only one allele is methylated; black: totally methylated or two alleles are methylated. 1–6: 6 CpG sites in promoter region; 1–8: 8 CpG sites in exon 4. (b) Representative results from methylation-specific PCR (MSP) showing that LC3A was unmethylated in cases 1, 4, and 5 while partially methylated in cases 3, 6, 7, and 8. Case 2 was excluded for the statistical analysis (see Supplementary Table 3), since no PCR products were observed most probably due to degraded genomic DNA. U: unmethylated; M: methylated.