5’-transfer RNA halve-lysine-CTT as a promising biomarker for early detection of hepatocellular carcinoma

Figure 1 Expression profiling and preliminary validation of transfer RNA-derived small RNAs in early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma. High-throughput sequencing was performed on three pairs of Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer 0/A stage hepatocellular carcinoma tissues and adjacent non-tumor tissues. A: Heatmap illustrating the correlation coefficient of tissue samples; B: Principal component analysis demonstrating sample clustering; C: Scatter plot comparing transfer transfer RNA-derived small RNAs (tsRNAs) expression between tumor and non-tumor tissues; D: Venn diagram depicting the number of commonly and specifically expressed tsRNAs in each group; E: Unsupervised hierarchical clustering heatmap of tsRNAs; F: Volcano plot highlighting differentially expressed tsRNAs (P < 0.05, |log₂FC| > 1.5); G: Eight candidate tsRNAs selected from the top upregulated tsRNAs based on expression level and signal homogeneity; H-O: Validation of the relative expression levels of the eight selected tsRNAs using quantitative polymerase chain reaction in the same tissue pairs. ^aP < 0.01; ^bP < 0.001; ^cP < 0.0001.