Fig. 1.

Identification of a short alternative transcript of TSP2 that is highly expressed in bladder cancer-associated blood vessels. a Blood vascular endothelial cells (BECs) were isolated from frozen sections of invasive bladder cancers (tBEC) and adjacent normal (nBEC) bladder tissue (n = 6). RNA was isolated and hybridized to Human Exon 1.0 ST arrays. a Detection of alternative splicing and transcription was performed using three different bioinformatics analysis tools, namely MIDAS, ANOSVA, and FIRMA. The numbers indicate the number of genes with alternative splicing or alternative transcription identified by each method and their overlap. b Exon array expression levels of the full-length and the short transcript of TSP2 and exon structure as shown in the GenBank database. c qRT-PCR analysis of the expression of the full-length and the short TSP2 transcripts in tumor-associated vessels and in vessels of healthy bladder tissue. For five out of six patients, matched samples of tumor-associated and healthy vessels could be analyzed as highlighted by the connecting dotted lines. The positions of the primers used are indicated by arrows in b. Horizontal lines represent median values. Dots represent patient samples. Relative expression was normalized to expression of vessels from healthy tissues in both groups. *p < 0.05