Figure 1.

Enrichment of immune cell populations in different metastatic sites. (A) Heatmaps depicting the distribution of immune cell enrichment scores according to metastatic site estimated using xCell, CIBERSORT, and TIMER. The distribution of immune cells varied across all samples. (B–D) Volcano plots showing enriched immune cells in specific metastatic sites compared to breast lesions. Wilcoxon rank test was applied to compare the enrichment of immune cells. A threshold of log₂FC was 0.5 to determine differential expression, and a p-value of 0.05 was considered significant. Values outside the range of x-axis were displayed at the margin of plots. Results from the xCell, CIBERSORT, and TIMER analyses are shown in (B–D), respectively. In CIBERSORT analysis, there were fewer macrophages in metastatic lymph nodes than in breast lesions. In xCell and CIBERSORT analyses, there were more neutrophils in metastatic bone lesions than in breast lesions.