Fig 6. Pyruvate carboxylase (PC) expression levels are altered in melanoma cells in response to BRAF signaling inhibitors.

(A) Representative depiction of the response of three different subclones of the SKMEL5 melanoma cell line to treatment with PLX4720, a mutant BRAF inhibitor, as reported by Paudel et al. [52] (see Fig 3A therein). (B) RNA expression levels of the PC gene (Z-score calculated after log2 normalization) in the three subclones in (A) at 3 days and 8 days post-treatment with PLX4720. The gene expression data was obtained from Jia et al. [53]. The error bars indicate the standard deviation. (C) RNA expression levels of MYC and PC genes (Z-score calculated after log2 normalization) in tumor samples obtained from melanoma patients. In each panel, the blue dot indicates the expression levels before treatment. The different red markers in each panel indicate the expression levels in samples obtained at different time points after treatment with BRAF signaling inhibitors. The gene expression data was downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus databse (accession GSE75299). See Song et al. [54] for details regarding the patient samples and the BRAF signaling inhibitor administered in each case. In panels C and D, the Z-scores were calculated as $Z_i^{PC}=\frac{E_i^{PC}-{\mu }^{PC}}{{\sigma }^{PC}}$ where $E_i^{PC}$ is the PC expression level in the i^th sample while μ^PC and σ^PC are the mean and standard deviation of the PC expression levels in the dataset, respectively.