Fig. 1

GPR107 was the most highly expressed GPCR in liver cancer and TICs. a The expression profiles of G-protein-coupled receptors in peri-tumor and tumor. GSE14520, containing 215 peri-tumor and 224 tumor samples, was used for analysis. 382 G-protein-coupled receptors in the probeset were shown. Blue and red represent low expression and high expression, respectively. The overviewed expression profile was shown in left panel and the top ten highly expressed GPRs were shown in right panel. b GPR107 was highly expressed in tumor samples. c, d The liver cancer patients were grouped according to metastasis (c) or relapse (d), followed by GPR107 expression examination. e HCC samples were grouped into two subsets according to GPR107 expression levels for Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. f Immunohistochemistry of GPR107. 19 peri-tumor, 7 early HCC (eHCC) and 12 advanced HCC (aHCC) were used for GPR107 staining. g, h GPR107 expression levels in liver TICs (g) and oncospheres (h) were examined by realtime PCR. GPR107 expression levels in liver non-TICs and non-spheres were normalized as 1. i, j GPR107 protein levels in liver TICs (i) and stem-like spheres (j) were examined by Western blot. For b, c, d, data are shown as box-and-whisker plots. Whiskers above and below boxes extend to the 95th and 5th percentiles, respectively. Horizontal lines within boxes denote median levels of gene intensity. For f, g, h, data were shown as means±s.d. Experiments were repeated four times