Figure 1

Overall miRNA expression in blood of lung cancer patients. A: Venn-diagram of detected miRNAs per group. Each circle of the three-way Venn-diagram indicates the numbers of miRNAs that are detected in whole blood samples of either all 20 adenocarcinoma patients, all 20 squamous cell lung cancer patients, or all 20 SCLC patients. Adeno-Ca = adenocarcinoma, sqCLC = squamous cell lung cancer, SCLC = small cell lung cancer. B: Heatmap of the 134 miRNAs detected in all analyzed 60 patient samples. Each column represents a blood sample and each row represents a miRNA. The miRNA expression values are visualized by the red-green color code, where green means low expression and red means high expression. The colored bars under the dendrogram indicate the histological subtype, the smoking status, the gender, and the metastatic state of the respective samples (red = squamous cell lung cancer (sqCLC), blue = adenocarcinoma, yellow = SCLC, pink = metastasis (M1a or M1b), cyan = no metastasis (M0), black = no information on metastasis state, skyblue = male, darkred = female, grey = current or former smoker, white = never-smoker).