Fig 1.
Western blotting and qPCR analyses of MYL9 expression in ESCC cell lines and tissues.
(A) MYL9 protein and (B) mRNA expression levels in NE1 and ESCC cell lines. Expression levels were normalized against GAPDH. Error bars represent the standard deviation of the mean (SD), which was calculated from three parallel experiments. (C) Representative western blots of MYL9 protein expression in eight matched pairs of ESCC tissues (T) and adjacent noncancerous tissues (ANT). GAPDH was used as the loading control. (D) Statistical analyses of MYL9 mRNA expression in matched paired T and ANT. N.S., not significant.
Fig 2.
IHC characteristics of MYL9 in ESCC specimens.
(A, B) Stromal cells in tumor tissues were positive for MYL9. Anti–α-SMA staining was used to distinguish stromal regions. (A) Representative staining of high MYL9 expression in tumor cell cytoplasm (left, ×40 magnification; right, ×400 magnification). (B) Representative staining of low MYL9 expression in tumor cell cytoplasm (left, ×40 magnification; right, ×400 magnification). Scale bar = 50 μm. (C) IHC assay of MYL9 protein expression in eight paired ESCC tissues. Scale bar = 50 μm.
Table 1.
Patient clinicopathological characteristics and MYL9 expression in ESCC.
Fig 3.
Association between MYL9 expression levels and tumor differentiation.
Representative staining of MYL9 expression in adjacent noncancerous tissue (ANT) and in well-, moderately, and poorly differentiated tumors. Scale bar = 50 μm. (B) The average MYL9 staining score was increased from well-differentiated to poorly differentiated tumors, and was significantly higher than that in ANT regions. IHC H-scores are expressed as the mean ± SD (bars); *p < 0.05.
Table 2.
Correlation between MYL9 expression and clinicopathological characteristics of ESCC.
Table 3.
Univariable and multivariable analyses of prognostic parameters in patients with ESCC.
Fig 4.
Kaplan–Meier curves of univariate analysis data (log–rank test).
(A, B) The RFS (A) and (B) OS of patients with high versus low MYL9 expression. (C) The OS for moderately/well-differentiated patients with high versus low MYL9 expression. (D) The OS for patients with T3+T4 classification with high versus low MYL9 expression. (E, F) The OS for patients without lymph node metastasis (E) and with lymph node metastasis (F) with high versus low MYL9 expression.