PBX3 promotes migration and invasion of colorectal cancer cells via activation of MAPK/ERK signaling pathway

Figure 1 Analysis of pre-B-cell leukemia homeobox 3 expression in colorectal cancer cell lines and specimens. A: Expression levels of pre-B-cell leukemia homeobox (PBX) 3 in LOVO and HCT8 cell lines with relatively high invasive potential were higher than in HT-29 and SW480 cells with low invasive potential, by RT-PCR and Western blot; B: Results in (A) were confirmed by Q-PCR. Data are presented as mean ± SD calculated from three independent experiments run in triplicate; C: Expression level of PBX3 in cancer tissues was significantly higher than that in adjacent normal tissues (n = 75); D-H: High level of PBX3 expression was correlated with local tissue invasion (D), lymph node metastasis (E), synchronous metastasis (F), advanced TNM stage (G), and distant metastasis (H, synchronous and metachronous metastasis). Horizontal lines in (C-H) indicate the median values of PBX3 expression for each group relative to GAPDH; I: Kaplan-Meier survival curves for CRC patients grouped by a cut-off value of median expression level of PBX3 indicated that patients with higher PBX3 displayed a shorter overall survival time after surgery. Note that (D-H) were generated from the corresponding data in Table 1.