Extended Data Fig. 2: Four molecular steps in carcinogenesis of lung SCC.
From: Immune evasion before tumour invasion in early lung squamous carcinogenesis
The heat map shows genes that are associated with developmental stages identified using a linear mixed-effects model. Annotation bars are included for cancer history, sex and smoking history, all of which were used as fixed factors for the linear model, along with patient information (which was used as a random effect). Gene expression discerned four molecular groups: normal, low grade, high grade and SCC, on the basis of semi-supervised hierarchical clustering. Normal tissue with normal fluorescence, hypofluorescent normal tissue and hyperplasia lesions were subsumed under the category of normal tissue (stages 0, 1 and 2); metaplasia, mild dysplasia and moderate dysplasia were grouped as low grade (stages 3, 4 and 5); severe dysplasia and carcinoma in situ comprised the high-grade category; and the invasive stage was singled out as SCC.
