Figure 2.

High S100 protein expression is associated with increased patient survival. (A) Only patients who received intensive induction therapy were included in the cluster; the mRNA levels were median normalized and log(10) transformed prior to unsupervised clustering using the program JExpress. Patients could be divided into two main subgroups according to low (patients L1-L12) and high (patients H1-H10)/intermediate (patients I1-I6) mRNA expression levels. The upper/low expression subgroup showed especially low (blue color) S100A8/A9 expression, whereas the group below, characterized by high expression, showed especially elevated (red color) levels for S100A12 and S100P. Patients with long-term survival (>2.5 years) are indicated to the right. The S100A4 and A10 values represent the mean value of two probes for these genes. B) Kaplan-Meier (calculated by SPSS version 25) comparison of patients with low S100 protein expression (L1-L12) versus patients with median or high levels, i.e., the two subgroups obtained in the cluster. In this patient cohort, elevated levels of S100 proteins are correlated with prolonged patient survival (log-rank test). Because the plot takes into account all eight differently expressed S100 proteins, the improved patient survival might be due to the impact of a single S100 member, to the whole panel of these eight proteins, or to a group of co-expressed genes, which remain to be identified yet.