Identification of fibrosis-associated biomarkers in heart failure and human cancers

Figures

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  Fig. 1. Flowchart depicting the multistep screening strategy used to analyze the bioinformatics data

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  Fig. 2. Differential expression analysis and functional enrichment of genes in GSE48166 dataset. (A) Heatmap displaying the clustered analysis of DEGs. (B) Volcano plot showing upregulated (red) and downregulated (blue) DEGs in heart failure patients compared to normal controls. (C) GO enrichment terms. (D) KEGG pathways

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  Fig. 3. Gene co-expression network analysis and identification of hub genes in GSE135055 dataset. (A) Selection of a soft threshold power (β) for constructing a scale-free gene co-expression network. (B) Dendrogram representing cluster analysis results, grouping genes with similar expression patterns into modules. (C) Identification of 22 modules by merging functionally equivalent gene clusters. (D) Intersection analysis between gene modules and previously identified DEGs and myocardial fibrosis-related genes, resulting in the identification of 12 hub genes

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  Fig. 4. Identification of hub myocardial fibrosis-related differentially expressed genes (MfDEGs) and network construction. (A) PPI network generated using the STRING database. (B) Top 10 candidate hub genes identified from the PPI network using the MCC algorithm of the CytoHubba plugin. (C) Significant gene module identified using the MCODE plugin in Cytoscape. (D) Visualization of the genes within the significant module

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  Fig. 5. Validation of hub gene expression in heart failure tissue using the GSE133054 dataset. Expression levels of FMOD, POSTN, PRELP, LTBP2, COL1A1, COL8A1, ASPN, and HBB in human heart samples were verified by comparing heart failure samples to normal control samples. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001

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  Fig. 6. Regulatory network of transcription factors (TFs) and miRNAs associated with validated hub genes. The red squares represent hub genes, the blue dots represent TFs, and the yellow dots represent miRNAs

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  Fig. 7. Expression profiles of validated hub genes across diverse cancer types. (A-G) Expression level of ASPN, COL1A1, COL8A1, FMOD, HBB, LTBP2 and POSTN in the combination of GTEx database and TCGA. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001, ****P < 0.0001

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  Fig. 8. Association between expression levels of validated hub genes and patient overall survival. (A-G) Forest plot of the risk ratio of ASPN, COL1A1, COL8A1, FMOD, HBB, LTBP2 and POSTN in human pan-cancer

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  Fig. 9. Immune Infiltration Landscape in myocardium samples. (A-B) Stacked bar charts showing the proportions of different immune cell types in myocardium samples from datasets GSE48166 and GSE135055. (C-D) Correlation analysis between validated genes and immune cells. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001, ****P < 0.0001

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  Fig. 10. Correlation between validated genes and CAFs