Fig. 1: Upregulation of TCOF1 in TNBC is correlated with poor prognosis.

a Bar graph depicting the percentage of breast cancer cases with upregulated TCOF1 mRNA expression, using a data set from TCGA (TCGA, Cell 2015 data set). mRNA expression z-score was set to ±1.5 as a threshold. z-score >1.5 is considered as upregulated expression. b Immunoblotting showing expression of TCOF1 in a panel of breast cancer cell lines. Her2 +++ Her2-overexpressed, BL1 basal-like, BL2 basal-like 2, M mesenchymal, MSL mesenchymal stem-like. Experiments in b were repeated twice independently with similar results. c Left panel showing representative IHC pictures of TNBC and non-TNBC. Graph showing the percentage of breast cancer cases displaying low, moderate, and high staining intensity of TCOF1 by IHC. Number of cases for TNBC and non-TNBC are 18 and 19, respectively. d TCOF1 mRNA expression in TNBC (Subset 1; n = 42) and normal adjacent tissue to TNBC (Subset 2; n = 21), data from Cancer RNA-seq Nexus. Expression data of three major transcripts are shown. e Kaplan–Meier survival analysis of breast cancer patients with high (number of patients n = 224) and low (number of patients n = 735) TCOF1 expression. The optimal cutpoint = 5.51. f Kaplan–Meier survival analysis of TNBC patients with high (number of patients n = 94) and low (number of patients n = 31) TCOF1 expression. Normalised TCOF1 mRNA values of all breast cancer cases have a normal distribution, with a median of 5.39. The optimal cutpoint = 5.35. g Kaplan–Meier survival analysis of basal-like breast cancer patients with high (number of patients n = 105) and low (number of patients n = 34) TCOF1 expression. The optimal cutpoint = 5.35. The p value in e–g was calculated by log-rank test (one-sided).