Figure 1

The HO-1 gene signature in BeWo cancer cells. (A) Western blot analysis of ctrl (LMP) or HO-1 shRNAmir-transduced BeWo cells (miHO-1) demonstrates efficient HO-1 knock-down. β-actin indicates equal loading. A representative example is shown. (B) A heat map of top 30 genes that discriminate HO-1 expressing (LMP) from HO-1 knockdown (miHO-1) cells as judged by LIMMA analysis (p < 0.05). Downregulated genes are shown in green and upregulated genes in red. Note that some genes are represented by multiple probe sets on the GeneChip. (C) Pathways enriched in HO-1 expressing BeWo cells. The number of genes contained within one pathway/gene set is given by 'Size'. Normalized enrichment score ('NES') is calculated by the GSEA software. Statistical significance is indicated by the nominal P-value ('NOMp-val') and the error is controlled by the false discover rate ('FDR q-val'). (D) Distribution of 20 pathway molecules for the top-ranking gene set amid the total ranked list of all transcripts analyzed by GSEA. Genes were rank ordered based on differential expression between LMP and miHO1 BeWo cells. (E) Corresponding heatmap showing relative expression of the 'Extracellular Region' pathway gene members in LMP and miHO-1 BeWo cells. Downregulated genes are shown in blue and upregulated genes in red.