Fig. 3: DNA methylation contributes to the downregulation of SLC38A4.

a Schematic structure of human SLC38A4 and mouse Slc38a4 genomic locus. Green boxes indicate the CpG islands. b Western blot analyses of SLC38A4 expression in Huh7 and Hep3B cells after treatment with 2.5 μM 5-Aza for 3 days. Data are shown as mean ± s.d. of n = 3 independent experiments. *P < 0.05 by Student’s t test. c Bisulfate DNA sequencing of CpG36 from three foetal liver tissues and three adult liver tissues. Data are shown as mean ± s.d. ****P < 0.0001 by Student’s t test. d Correlation between SLC38A4 expression from TCGA LIHC dataset and methylation probes in CpG64 from TCGA Illumina Infinium Human DNA Methylation 450k bead chip in LIHC. Representative figure of correlation between SLC38A4 expression and methylation probe cg00719651 is shown on the right. e Bisulfate DNA sequencing of CpG64 from 5 pairs of human HCC tissues and nontumor liver tissues. Data are shown as mean ± s.d. ****P < 0.0001 by Student’s t test.