Research Paper Volume 15, Issue 4 pp 1039—1051

Figure 2. Metabolomic and transcriptional profiling reveals RIOK3 promotes arginine uptake in PDAC cells by upregulating SLC7A2 expression. (A) Heatmap of the differential metabolites of high-RIOK3 expression PDAC tissues compared with the paired adjacent normal tissues based on nontargeted metabolomic analysis (| Log2FC |>1, p<0.05). Blue represents the decreasing trend, and red represents the increasing trend. Paired Samples Wilcoxon test. (B) KEGG pathway enrichment analysis of the 47 differential metabolites. (https://www.metaboanalyst.ca/). (C) Venn diagram summarizing that 7 mRNAs were detected in the two independent RIOK3-knockdown cells (| Log2FC |>1, p<0.05). (D) Heatmap of 7 mRNAs that were detected in the two independent RIOK3-knockdown cells (| Log2FC |>1, p<0.05). (E) Western blot analysis of RIOK3 and SLC7A2 in shRIOK3-1/2 cells (PANC-1 and BxPC-3 cells, respectively). One-way ANOVA test. (F) The content of Arg was analyzed in the intracellular and culture medium of shRIOK3-1/2 cells (PANC-1 and BxPC-3 cells, respectively). One-way ANOVA test. All experiments were performed independently at least three times. The star (*) symbol denotes the level of statistical significance: * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001, ns no significance.