Fig. 5

Sub-network of Fibronectin (FN1) and its differentially expressed first degree neighbours showing expression between static and flow-exposed MDA-MB-231 (a) and MCF-7 (b) breast cancer cells. Red and blue nodes respectively represent genes that were upregulated and downregulated upon flow exposure. Box plots showing expression of FN1 (c), PLAU (e), and ALCAM (g) between normal volunteers and patients with several stratifications of breast cancer. Expression data was obtained from TCGA (Synapse ID 1461151) and consisted of 104 healthy volunteers (normal), 317 luminal A, 93 luminal B, 26 HER2 and 81 basal patients. The boxes show the median and the interquartile range. The whiskers show the minimum and maximum. *** = p value ≤ 0.001. Kaplan–Meier curves of relapse-free survival times of breast cancer patients with lymph node positive status (n = 936), stratified by FN1 (d), PLAU (f) and ALCAM (h) expression. Data was obtained from http//kmplot.com/analysis and statistical significance was determined by the log-rank test. Survival plots for FN1 and PLAU are statistically significant (p ≤ 0.05) while that of ALCAM is not statistically significant (p = 0.18)