Fig. 3: Cancer-associated adipocytes exhibit similar phenotypes to BECN1-deficient adipocytes.

a Differential interference contrast microscopy image of adipocytes co-cultured with EO771 for the indicated duration. b Relative mRNA expression of adipogenic genes from differentiated 10T1/2 adipocytes co-cultured with EO771 breast cancer cells for 4 days (n = 3, biologically independent samples per group). c Western blotting analysis of protein lysates isolated from differentiated 10T1/2 adipocytes co-cultured with EO771 breast cancer cells over the time course. d Colony assay of 50 EO771 cells co-cultured with the indicated number of adipocytes. Each colony size was measured using imageJ (50 distinct colonies per group). This experiment was conducted once. e Image of naive and peri-tumoral iWAT samples resected from a mouse. f GSEA result of BaKO and naive adipose tissue ranked by NES. Gene sets that also appear to be differentially expressed in peritumoral WAT are colored in red and blue. g Venn diagram of GSEA results on BaKO and peritumoral WATs compared to naive adipose tissue; p\(\, < 0.01\), FDR < 0.05, NES < −1 or NES > 1 (h) GSEA plots for adipogenesis, (i) FA metabolism, and (j) YAP conserved signaling gene sets compared between naive, peritumoral, and BaKO WAT. Statistics were calculated using two-tailed unpaired students t-test (b, d). Data are shown as mean \(\pm \,\)SEM; *p \(\le 0.05\), **p\(\,\le 0.01\), ***p\(\,\le 0.001\). Western blot results are representatives of at least three independent experiments.