Fig. 8. Low H3K36me3, but high ATG12 protein expression levels are observed in ccRCC tumors, and SETD2 and ATG12 gene expression levels have prognostic values for ccRCC patients.

a Human kidney tissue microarrays including 30 tissues classified as ccRCC tumors (highlighted in light gray) were proceed for immunohistochemical staining for H3K36me3 (b) and ATG12 protein (c) and revealed low H3K36me3 (d) but high ATG12 (e) protein expressions. HeLa were used as a positive control for H3K36me3 protein expression in b. f, g SETD2 and ATG12 high versus low gene expression levels (expressed in FPKM and with a cut off of 5.37 for SETD2 and 4.66 for ATG12) in tumor tissue derived from ccRCC patients at the time of diagnosis and their correlation to patient survival, i.e., follow up after diagnosis (expressed in years) was extracted from the pathology atlas of the human cancer transcriptome available at the Human Protein Atlas (www.proteinatlas.org). Survival analysis, prognosis of each group of patients examined using Kaplan–Meier survival estimators, and survival outcomes of the groups compared by log-rank tests revealed that SETD2 should be considered as a favorable prognostic gene and ATG12 as an unfavorable prognostic gene for ccRCC patients.