Fig 2: Patient survival analysis and immune cell type activities in patient tumors grouped by the expression level of RAD52 and PBX2 in TCGA-BRCA. (A) When RAD52 mRNA was overexpressed, patients survived for a shorter length of time. Kaplan–Meier analysis was not significant. (C) When PBX2 mRNA was overexpressed, patients survived significantly longer. (E) When the patients were grouped by the expression level of RAD52 and PBX2 together, the patient group with both genes expressed lower survived the longest among the four groups; the patient group with higher RAD52 mRNA expression and lower PBX2 mRNA expression survived the for the shortest length of time among the four groups. Panels (B,D) show the log2 ratio of xCell scores of patient samples grouped by the mRNA expression level of RAD52 and PBX2, respectively. Cell types that had significantly different activities between the high- and low-expression groups in two-sample t-tests were included. Panel (F) shows the F-statistics of xCell scores grouped by the mRNA expression level of RAD52 and PBX2. Cell types that were significant in the ANOVA tests were included. *: p < 0.05; **: p < 0.01; ***: p < 0.001.

Fig 3: Protein expression validation of the marker genes. (A). Protein expression of PBX2, RAD50, and RAD52 in cell lines MCF10A, MCF7, AU565, BT474, and MDA453 in Western blots. (B). Immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining of RAD52 in breast cancer tumor tissue. (C). IHC staining of PBX2 in breast cancer tumor tissue. Both pictures (B,C) were shot with an objective of 40×. (D). IHC with control, RAD52, and PBX2 in normal breast tissue, viewed at 20×.