Fig. 1
Selection of miRNAs to evaluate as prognostic biomarkers for DLBCL patients. a Heat-map of hierarchical clustering of 31 selected miRNAs on serum of DLBCL patients at diagnosis (untreated) and after R-CHOP treatment (treated). MiRNA expression levels are shown as colour variations. Higher and lower values are represented by red and green points, respectively. Pairwise distances between rows and between columns were computed by Euclide distance metric. b Kaplan-Meier PFS curves. Correlation between the indicated miRNAs and the rate of recurrence of DLBCL patients from TCGA data analysis. c Box-plot diagrams of relative miRNA expression levels, before/after treatment, in serum samples from DLBCL patients (n = 16), assessed by qRT–PCR. Box-plot diagrams of selected miRNA expression levels in pre-treatment and post-treatment serum samples from a small cohort of DLBCL patients (n = 16). Boxes define the 25th and 75th percentiles; the horizontal line into the boxes indicates the median, and bars define the minimum and maximum values. The expression levels of mature miRNAs were normalized to volume and UniSp2 spike-in RNA. Relative expression was calculated using the comparative ΔCt method. p-values (*** = p ≤ 0.001) were determined using the Mann–Whitney rank sum test