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. 2019 Jul 9;9(18):5246–5260. doi: 10.7150/thno.34713

Figure 1.

Figure 1

APLN is overexpressed in HCC tissues and is a prognostic biomarker for HCC patients. (A) mRNA expression of APLN in 17 and 10 paired HCC and adjacent non-tumor tissues from NAFLD-HCC (RNA-seq) and HBV-HCC patients (gene expression array) from Hong Kong cohort. Wilcoxon matched-pairs test was performed. (B) Fold change (FC) of APLN mRNA expression (tumor/ adjacent normal) across multiple cancer types from TCGA. Data was acquired from firebrowse (http://firebrowse.org). Full name of cancer-type abbreviations and their sample sizes are provided in Table S1. (C) Protein expression of APLN in 17 pairs of HCC (T) and adjacent normal tissue (N). Quantification was performed by ImageJ. Wilcoxon matched-pairs test was performed. (D) mRNA expression of APLN in normal liver tissues (Normal), adjacent normal tissues (N) and HCC (T) from three independent HCC cohorts. Mann-Whitney U-test was performed. (E) Kaplan-Meier survival analysis (left panel) indicated that HCC patients with high expression of APLN had worse overall survival in three independent HCC cohorts. By multivariate Cox regression analysis (right panel), high APLN expression was an independent prognostic factor in all three cohorts. (* P < 0.05, ** P < 0.01, *** P < 0.001).