Fig. 2
WGCNA identifies module genes associated with SPP1 + macrophages. (A) Among 502 HNSCC-TCGA data instances, after excluding outliers (red line = 430), a total of 471 samples were analyzed. (B) Analysis of the scale-free fitting index (left) and average connectivity (right) for different soft-thresholding powers identified the optimal soft-thresholding power as 6 (R^2 = 0.921). (C) Dendrogram of 18,253 encoded genes based on dissimilarity measure (1-TOM) clustering, with each module containing at least 30 genes. (D) Heatmap depicting the correlation between module feature genes and SPP1 + macrophage abundance. (E) Scatter plot showing the association between midnight blue and brown module membership and gene expression correlation with Mac_SPP1 cell abundance. (F) Volcano plot of 2,872 differentially expressed genes between tumor and adjacent normal tissue. (G) Venn diagram presenting 193 overlapping genes between module genes and differentially expressed genes. (H) After applying Cox univariate regression analysis to the intersection genes. 14 genes were identified as significantly associated with patient survival prognosis (P < 0.05).
