Fig. 1: Expression of LETN in cancers and its function in tumor cell proliferation.

a Copy number variations of the LETN gene locus in pan-cancer tumors. The data were obtained from 22 cancer types in TCGA. Refer to Supplementary information, Fig. S1b for the data of each specific cancer type. b Box plots showing the RNA expression levels of LETN (FPKM after upper-quantile normalization) in tumors of different cancer types and in the corresponding normal tissues. The data were obtained from TCGA. The 22 cancer types were sorted from left to right according to the significance of the LETN differential expression between the tumors and the paired normal tissues. c Cell proliferation curves of HUH7, HCC827, DU145 and PC3 cells upon siRNA-mediated knockdown of LETN. The y-axis, cell confluence fold-change (FC) in relative to the confluence at time 0. The error bars represent the ± SD of three biological replicates. d, e Anchorage-dependent (d) and -independent (e) colony formation of HCC827 and HUH7 cells upon shRNA-mediated knockdown of LETN. f Cell proliferation curves of HUH7 and HCC827 cells with stable overexpression of LETN. The error bars represent the ± SD of three biological replicates. g Anchorage-dependent colony formation of HUH7 and HCC827 cells with stable overexpression of LETN. h, i Three million of the HUH7 cells with lentivirus-mediated stable LETN knockdown (h) or 1 million of the cells with stable overexpression of LETN (i) were implanted into the nude mice (n = 5 for knockdown and n = 6 for overexpression) for xenograft tumor models. Images, weights, and growth records of the tumors are being presented. The error bars represent the ± SD of the tumors.