Potential autocrine RTK signaling in MIBC patient samples and BCa cell lines.

(A) Heat map showing relative mRNA expression levels of ctRTK-cognate ligand pairs (RNA Seq V2) among 408 tumor samples from patients with MIBC [22] (left), and among 15 BCa-derived cell lines (absolute mRNA copy number, right). (B) Immunoblot detection of ctRTKs and their cognate ligands, CSF1/CSF1R, GAS6/AXL, MST1/MST1R, and evidence of DDR1, DDR2 and PTK7 proteins in 9 BCa-derived cell lines. GAPDH (bottom panel) serves as a loading control. (C) Left: heat map showing relative mRNA expression levels of 9 EMT-associated transcriptional activators (listed at right) among 408 tumor samples from patients with MIBC [22]. Samples are grouped on the horizontal axis by mRNA subtype classifications defined previously [22] indicated at the top (from left to right): neuronal (N, green); basal squamous (BS, red); luminal (L, gray); luminal infiltrating (LI, gold); luminal papillary (LP, purple), and clustered hierarchically on the vertical axis. Right: heat map showing absolute mRNA copy levels of 9 EMT-associated transcriptional activators among 15 BCa-derived cell lines (identified at bottom).