Fig 2: Effect of 5-FU on the expression of ADAM12 and MUC4 isoforms. Waterfall plots for SW480 and SW620 cells treated with 0, 1, 10 or 100 µM 5-FU for 24, 48, 72 or 96 h. The expression of isoforms detected by the primers for (A) ADAM12-All, (B) ADAM12-245, (C) MUC4-All and (D) MUC4-4.

Fig 3: Sequence similarity analyses for ADAM12. (A): Sequence similarity of the five alternatively spliced isoforms of ADAM12. (B): Illustration of the exon organization of ADAM12 used to design primers for the specific amplification of alternatively spliced isoforms. The ADAM12 gene and isoforms are presented as horizontal lines. Each vertical bar represents an exon separated by intronic regions. The image shows the skipping of exon 14 in all isoforms and the pretermination of isoforms 2, 4 and 5.

Fig 4: Survival curves of the prognostic value of ADAM12 and MUC4 in colorectal adenocarcinoma. Two TCGA transcriptomics datasets generated from patients with colorectal adenocarcinoma were used to evaluate the prognostic potential of ADAM12 and MUC4. A high expression of ADAM12 predicted a shorter OS (A) colorectal adenocarcinoma TCGA Firehose Legacy dataset) and a shorter DSS (B) colorectal adenocarcinoma TCGA PanCancer Atlas dataset). A low expression of MUC4 predicted a shorter OS (C) colorectal adenocarcinoma TCGA Firehose Legacy dataset) and a shorter DSS (D) colorectal adenocarcinoma TCGA PanCancer Atlas dataset). OS: overall survival; DSS: disease-specific survival.

Fig 5: Analysis of microarray data for tumor and adjacent normal samples from patients with CRC. (A): Expression of ADAM12 in a previous microarray study. ADAM12 was significantly upregulated in tumor samples. (B): The expression of MUC4 in a previous microarray study. MUC4 was significantly downregulated in tumor samples. Graphs represent data from 48 patients with CRC. Welch’s t-test was used to determine statistical significance. *** denotes p-value < 0.001.