Fig. 1
BRSK2 expression correlates with clinical outcomes in patients with breast cancer. (A) Boxplots show elevated log2 expression of BRSK2 mRNA in breast cancer patients from the TCGA-BRCA whole cohort (n = 1092) compared to normal adjacent breast tissue (n = 112). ***p < 0.001 (tumor vs. normal). (B) Boxplots show elevated BRSK2 transcript levels in metastatic patients (n = 7) from the TCGA-BRCA cohort compared to normal adjacent breast tissues (n = 112). (C) Boxplots of high expression of BRSK2 mRNA of tumors of different American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stages for TCGA-BRCA cohort. (D) Boxplots of high BRSK2 expression score by immunohistochemistry (IHC) determined subtype in the TCGA-BRCA cohort. All boxes are presented as medians with interquartile range. Mann–Whitney U and Kruskal–Wallis H tests were used for the analysis. For some figures, significant p-values are shown. *p < 0.05 was considered significant. (E) Kaplan–Meier plots with log-rank p-values for disease-specific survival (DSS) in the TCGA-BRCA cohort, stratified by BRSK2 mRNA expression. Adverse DSS with higher BRSK2 transcripts was found in the TCGA-BRCA cohort, and the log − rank test was used for the analysis. The median split patients and significant p-values are shown (p = 0.005). (F) BRSK2 transcripts were analyzed by quantitative PCR (qPCR) in patients with primary tumors. Primary tumors (never-metastatic, n = 10) and age-matched primary tumors from patients with a history of metastasis (n = 10)44 were used for qPCR analysis of BRSK2 and GAPGH as a housekeeping control gene. Normalized BRSK2 gene levels to GAPDH (2^−delta CTx10,000) are shown. The student’s t-test, **p < 0.01, is significant in experimental triplicate.
