Fig. 1

Previously identified EMT signature genes have distinct temporal expression dynamics during epithelial to mesenchymal transition in lung cancer. a The heatmaps show the normalized gene expression levels of 76 known EMT genes across H358’s ten EMT stages (left, 0 h, 1 h, 2 h, 4 h, 6 h, 8 h, 16 h, 24 h, 72 h, 168 h) and A549’s eight EMT stages (right, 0 h, 6 h, 12 h, 24 h, 36 h, 48 h, 72, 96 h) [16, 17]. These EMT genes were predicted according to their fold changes between epithelial and mesenchymal states only. Red: highly expressed. Green: lowly expressed. b PCA of 76 known EMT genes using their gene expression data in H358 EMT. The dots are genes. The x-axis is the PC1 coefficient, and the y-axis is the PC2 coefficient. The four gene groups have been clustered by K-means. The embedded boxplots display the gene expression level distributions across H358 EMT stages for four groups. The cyan group represents genes with an increasing expression pattern at middle EMT stages (~72 h and continuing) that includes the EMT associated EGFR resistance oncogene AXL [10]. The red group consists of EMT genes including TGFB1 having an increasing expression pattern at ~ 16 h which decays after 168 h. The gene expression in the green group increases slowly from 16 h but dramatically decreases after 168 h. The blue group includes genes that are decreasing in expression during EMT (from 24 h on)