Fig. 2: The metabolomic landscape of triple-negative breast cancer.

a, b volcano plots of the 594 annotated polar metabolites (a) and 1944 lipids (b) profiled. Metabolites of different categories were individually color-coded. Right part of panel b: Log₂ fold changes of the abundances of different categories of lipids in TNBC tumor tissues as compared with normal tissues. Log₂ fold change value of 0 (the dashed red line) indicates the same level of lipid abundance between the tumor and the normal. c A pathway-based analysis of metabolomic changes between tumor and normal tissues. The DA score captures the average, gross changes for all metabolites in a pathway. A score of 1 indicates that all measured metabolites in the pathway increase in the tumor compared to normal tissues, and a score of −1 indicates that all measured metabolites in a pathway decrease. Pathways with no less than three measured metabolites were used for DA score calculation. d SNF clustering of metabolomic data. e Pathway abundance (PA) scores between C1 and C2 subtypes. The PA score was calculated as the mean log₂ fold change of the abundances of measured metabolites in this pathway. f Degree of overall metabolomic dysregulation among three metabolomic subtypes. For each metabolomic subtype, the mean log₂ fold change of metabolites between tumor and normal tissues was calculated to represent the overall degree of metabolomic dysregulation.