Hierarchical Clustering and Network Analyses Revealed Novel Gene Interactions in Melanoma Progression.

<p>(<b>A</b>) Heatmap of five patient-derived metastatic melanoma cell lines. Metastases of human melanoma cell lines were clustered according to the expression profiles of genes <i>CTCF</i>, <i>FBLIM1</i>, <i>HSPB1, NDRG2, NSD1, SERPINE1, SRC</i> and <i>VDR</i>. Heatmaps were generated by unsupervised hierarchical clustering using the Pearson correlation as metric distance and average-linkage as algorithm as well. The saturation of either color (scale from green to red) reflects the magnitude of the difference on gene expression level. (<b>B</b>) Despite the molecular heterogenety observed in melanoma cells, relevance networks pointed out gene interactions commonly observed among the metastases examined, such as <i>NDRG2</i>/<i>NSD1</i>, <i>VDR</i>/<i>NSD1</i>, <i>SRC</i>/<i>NSD1</i>, <i>CTCF</i>/<i>SERPINE1</i>, <i>HSPB1</i>/<i>SERPINE1</i> and <i>FBLIM1</i>/<i>SERPINE1</i>. FM305: human primary melanocytes from neonatal foreskin; Mel-2: right supraclavicular lymph node metastasis; Mel-3: counterpart of Mel-2 after the re-occurrence of the disease; Mel-11: brain metastasis; Mel-14: axillary lymph node metastasis, and Mel-33: inguinal lymph node metastasis.