Fig. 2

Comparison of phosphorylation levels of members of PI3K/AKT pathway between matched circulating and skin-resident SS cells. a upper panel, a phospho-proteins kinase array was probed with protein lysates of blood and skin-derived SS cells concurrently obtained from 2 SS patients. The dots corresponding to p-mTOR, p-PRAS40, p-BAD and p-PDK1 were indicated with black lines. Housekeeping protein is represented by *. a lower panel, graph represents the densitometric values of dots corresponding to each protein normalized to housekeeping and expressed as fold change (FC) with respect to matched blood SS cells. b left panel, WB validation for indicated proteins was accomplished in matched skin (S) and blood (B) SS cells of four SS patients. Because of the timing of patient recruitment, the gels were run at separate times and the lanes were composed for the  figure. b right panel, graph represents the densitometric values of normalized phosphorylated proteins expressed as FC with respect to matched blood SS cells. c IHC for pP70S6K shows a weak positivity in 4% of circulating SS cells and an intense positivity in about 70% of skin-resident SS cells concurrently obtained from patient SS 82. Inserts show SS cells at higher magnification. A weak positivity is also observed in neutrophil cells (arrow)