Fig. 1: PRPS2 is upregulated in lung malignancies clinically.

a Schematic diagram of PRPS enzymes in the purine biosynthesis pathway. b, c The endogenous mRNA expression levels of the PRPS2 (b) or PRPS1 (c) gene in 47 pairs of clinical lung adenocarcinoma specimens alongside adjacent normal tissues were analyzed. β-actin was used as an internal control. The black arrows indicate the samples randomly selected for subsequent detection of endogenous PRPS2 protein expression levels. The data were plotted as average values of biological triplicates. d The endogenous PRPS2 protein levels from the randomly selected 12 pairs of lung adenocarcinoma specimens with adjacent normal tissues were analyzed. Vinculin served as an internal control. e–g The mRNA expression levels of the PRPS2 or PRPS1 gene in clinical lung adenocarcinoma specimen tissues (LUAD) were compared with normal tissues from TCGA (e) or GEO (f, g) databases, respectively. The data in (e, f) were plotted as the mean ± SDs. *p < 0.05, and ***p < 0.001 for pairwise comparisons calculated using a two-tailed Student’s t-test in (e–g). h–k The effects of PRPS2 or PRPS1 mRNA expression on Kaplan-Meier survival curves of lung adenocarcinoma patients in the TCGA database (h, i) or GEO database (j, k) indicated that high mRNA expression of PRPS2 is associated with poorer prognosis for lung adenocarcinoma patients.