Involvement of methylation-associated silencing of formin 2 in colorectal carcinogenesis

Figure 2 Hypermethylation of formin 2 correlates with decreased expression of formin 2 during colorectal cancer. A: The expression of the formin 2 (FMN2) gene is significantly inversely correlated with the methylation level (Pearson correlation analysis); B: Quantitative real-time RT-PCR for FMN2 was carried out on nine colorectal cancer surgical specimens (filled bars) and paired noncancerous tissues (unfilled bars). The expression levels in the tumor samples were independently calculated relative to those in the nontumor samples, which are normalized to 1. Vertical bar, SD; ^aP < 0.05, ^bP < 0.03, ^cP < 0.01 (unpaired t-test); C-F: Results of MethylTarget^™ assays on nine paired noncancerous tissues and colorectal cancer tissues. Four CpG regions (FMN2-1, FMN2-2, FMN2-3, and FMN2-4) from CpG islands adjacent to the FMN2 promoter were sequenced (unpaired t-test. More details about the four CpG regions can be found in Table 2).