Fig. 1

POSTN enhances migratory, invasive and colony forming abilities of ovarian cancer cells in vitro. A Heatmap of gene transcripts expression changes that are greater than 1.5 fold in both A2780 and SKOV3 isogenic high/low invasive cell line pairs by microarray. B Western blot analysis for detecting the POSTN level in SKOV-I6 cells infected with lentiviral vectors encoding shPOSTN or a scrambled control. C Cell migration and invasion was performed using 8.0-μm pore chamber for 15 h. A non-specific shRNA was used as the control. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01. D Anchorage independent growth in soft agar of SKOV3 and SKOV-I6 cells with or without POSTN knockdown was evaluated by seeding 1 × 10⁴ cells in 6-well plates containing 0.4% low melting agar and culturing for 7 days. E–G POSTN was correlated with advanced-stages of ovarian cancer in Tothill cohort (GSE9891) and commercial ovarian cancer cDNA array and CMUH datasets. H Kaplan–Meier curves were generated to assess correlations between POSTN expression and 5-year survival rates in ovarian cancer patients from the Tothill (GSE9891) (n = 276) datasets. Median value was used as the cut off for grouping low and high POSTN expression patients