Fig. 2

Functional enrichment of differentially expressed exosome-derived EMT genes. (A) The venn diagram about the gene overlapping after combination of EMT, exosome and differentially expression analysis of TCGA dataset. By starting from the EMT-related genes, we first identified those reliable exosome-based EMT regulators using gene ID mapping. The differential expression gene (DEG) analysis on both LUAD and LUAS identified 41 and 74 DEGs in the paired tumor and normal samples. By overlapping four gene sets from exosome, EMT and DEGs, we focused on 25 genes not explored in lung cancer based on the literature database. The final top 25 genes were future screened, and the top candidate was validated by experimental evidence in lung cancer cell lines. (B) Functional enrichment of differentially expressed exosome-derived EMT genes in LUAD. (C) Functional enrichment of differentially expressed exosome-derived EMT genes in LUSC. (D) The functional enrichment of non-EMT-associated exosome genes. The number of genes in each pathway is represented by the size of the bubbles. The color of the bubble is related to the fold changes between tumor and normal samples. The permutation analysis to used to estimate the significance of the pathway, which is defined as the pathway enrichment score. The larger score means the pathway is more significant based on permutation results.