Fig. 4

Representative expression patterns and associated with survival rates of TSPY downstream genes in HCC. a TSPY stimulated the expression levels of CDC25B, HMMR, and PPARGC1A, in HuH-7 cells. The results of transcriptome analysis (n = 3) were presented with the P-values by Student t-tests. b–d Left panels, expression levels of TSPY and selected downstream genes, e.g. CDC25B, HMMR, and PPARGC1A, among female non-tumor liver (NT), female HCC, male non-tumor liver (NT), male TSPY-silent HCC (TS(−)), and male TSPY-high HCC (TS(++)), in the TCGA transcriptome dataset. Y-axis indicates the expression level as RSEN normalized count. Right panels, survival analyses of the TCGA data, comparing the high-expresser HCC patients (red lines) and the low-expresser HCC patients (blue lines) for the respective genes. Both male and female cases were included in these analyses. Log-rank test P-values are indicated. Abbreviations; **t-test P-value < 0.005; *P-value < 0.05; nd, P-value > 0.05. See Additional file 5: Figure S2 and Additional file 6: Figure S3 for same analyses for all 16 potential TSPY downstream genes