Fig. 3

Parainflammation genes are overexpressed in carcinoma cell lines. a Heatmap of the expression of 39 PI genes in 634 carcinoma cell lines and 180 hematopoietic and lymphoid cancer cell lines from CCLE. One PI gene, IFITM3, is not represented in CCLE. Of the PI genes, 19 show significantly higher expression in carcinomas compared with cancers originated from immune cell types; 10 PI genes are more abundant in immune cancers. b Left: the distribution of expression of two representative genes across 634 carcinoma cell lines from CCLE. We detected the expression peak and counted the number of samples that express the gene twofold (1 in log2 scale) more than the peak. The top example, the gene CSNK1A1 (CKIα), which here represents a housekeeping gene, is a typical normally distributed gene with low “overexpression” rate and the bottom example, BST2, which is part of the PI signature, shows a gene with a bimodal expression pattern, corresponding to a high “overexpression” rate. Right: the cumulative overexpression rates for the PI genes, all inflammatory response genes, and all genes. Of the PI signature genes, 29 (74.4 %) are overexpressed in at least 10 % of the carcinoma cell lines (≥64 samples) compared with 29.6 % and 40.5 % of all and inflammatory response genes, respectively. The yellow curve (PI genes) shows remarkably higher levels of overexpression along the whole graph. c Spread plot of tThe PI score in 634 carcinoma cell lines grouped by tissue types. The dashed blue line differentiates PI+ and PI− samples as defined by the proportion of PI+ of tumor samples