Fig. 6: Profiles of CXXC5 and Wnt/β-catenin signaling in the skin tissues of human DFU patients.

a Gene set enrichment analysis of microarray transcriptome data from patients with DFUs to determine the Wnt/β-catenin signaling-activated gene signature. Black columns indicate 283 enriched genes involving the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway in the skin tissues of non-DFU or DFU patients (n = 3). ES, enrichment score; NES, normalized enrichment score; FDR, false discovery rate; P: p-value. b-d The skin tissues of non-DFU or DFU regions from patients with DFUs (Supplementary Table 2). b Representative IHC images of CXXC5 and β-catenin expression in the dermis layers of skin tissues (n = 3). Scale bars, 100 µm. c Quantitative mean intensity of IHC staining of cytosolic CXXC5 and nuclear β-catenin was determined and is presented as the correlation of cytosolic CXXC5 with nuclear β-catenin (n = 10). d Representative images of DAB staining of angiogenesis markers, such as CD31, VEGFA, VEGFR2, and CD34 (n = 3). Scale bars, 100 µm. All data are presented as the mean ± SD. *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001 determined by Student’s t test.