Fig. 5

Clinical correlation of key genes in ETR.sig. A Heatmap illustrating differences in expression of key genes within the ETR.sig across eight cancer types, utilizing blood-derived exosome RT–qPCR data, blood-derived exoRNA-seq, and TCGA RNA-seq data for comparisons between cancer and control samples. In the heatmap, red denotes significantly upregulated key genes, blue indicates significantly downregulated key genes, and white signifies no significant difference. The middle numbers represent |Log2FC| values. Gene types are categorized within ETR.sig as cancer candidate driver genes (CCG) in orange and non-TSG or POG genes in purple (genes that are neither tumor-promoting nor tumor-suppressing). The bar chart above depicts the proportion of gene types with differential expression in each column. The gene number ratio indicates the proportion of upregulated (in red), downregulated (in blue), or unchanged (in gray) genes in each column or row. B Bubble plot illustrating the correlation of key genes within the ETR.sig cohort with clinical tumor stage and survival based on the TCGA cohort. The X-axis represents cancer types in the TCGA cohort, while the Y-axis represents key genes in the ETR.sig cohort. Pink indicates a positive correlation between increased gene expression and advanced tumor stage or worse clinical prognosis, while blue indicates the opposite correlation. All presented results were significant at P < 0.05. C K‒M curve plot: the prognostic value of the overall survival rate across cancers according to the GSVA estimation of the ETR.sig score