Fig 1: Activation of the Aerobic Glycolysis Pathway in EC. A Heatmap illustrating the enrichment scores of 84 canonical metabolism pathways in normal endometrium versus EC tissue. B Volcano plot of comparison of metabolism pathways GSVA scores between normal endometrium and EC tissue. C, D Box plot (C) and heatmap (D) demonstrate that the GSVA scores of the glycolysis pathway are consistently higher in EC compared to normal endometrium. E The GSEA plot reinforces the finding of aerobic glycolysis activation in EC. F A comparison of extracellular lactate concentrations among HEC-1B, Ishikawa cell lines, and patient endometrial glandular cells. G–I Bioinformatics analysis (G), RT-PCR (H), and immunohistochemical staining (Magnification: 200 ×) (I) consistently demonstrate upregulated expression of several key enzymes involved in the aerobic glycolysis pathway in EC. J Box plot of comparison of IHC scores of MCT4, LDHA, HK2, and GLUT3. K The Kaplan–Meier survival plot, based on the TCGA cohort, shows that high expression of HK2 and SLC16A1, predicts worse disease-free survival in EC. EC: endometrial cancer; GSVA: gene set variation analysis; GSEA: gene set enrichment analysis; TCGA: The Cancer Genome Atlas. *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.001; ns: no significance