Figure 1.
Immunohistochemical expression of GPER in invasive breast carcinoma.
A: A predominantly cytoplasmic expression in a moderate differentiated invasive ductal carcinoma. B: A predominantly cytoplasmic expression in a well differentiated invasive ductal carcinoma with a perinuclear accentuation. C: Strong nuclear expression in a poorly differentiated invasive ductal breast cancer. D: Epithelium of terminal ductal-lobular units of normal breast tissue shows strong nuclear expression. The magnification of all images is 200×.
Figure 2.
Analysis of GPER localization by conventional and confocal immunofluorescence microscopy.
Representative images of two independent experiments each performed in duplicates. A: Immunofluorescence microscopy showing a different expression pattern in MCF7 (predominantly nuclear) and T47D (predominantly cytoplasmic). The GPER-negative MDA-MB231 cell line was used as negative control. B: Confocal microscopy in T47D and MCF7 using a Leica SP5 microscope (with Leica HyD hybrid detection system). T47D show a strong GPER expression which is mainly localized in the cytoplasm of the cell. No distinct membranous expression was observed. MCF7 show a less strong GPER expression, which is clearly detectable inside the nucleus by analysis of the confocal images.
Table 1.
Clinicopathological parameters of the primary invasive breast carcinomas (n = 981).
Table 2.
Correlation between the clinicopathological factors and GPER expression.
Figure 3.
Kaplan-Meier analysis: Better overall survival in patients with positive cytoplasmic GPER expression compared to negative cytoplasmic GPER expression (log rank, p = 0.012).
Table 3.
Univariate COX regression analysis: factors predicting overall survival.