<p>The two-dimension hierarchical clustering procedure was performed based on the 1- Pearson correlation distance and the average linkage method. All data were centered by rows to mean 0 and standard deviation of 1, meanwhile the data range was confined to −3 to 3 for a more comparable scale. The data are presented in a matrix format with columns representing individual samples and rows representing genes, thereby each cell in the matrix represents the expression level of a gene feature in an individual sample. The red and green colors in cells reflect high and low expression levels, respectively, as indicated in the fold-change scale bar. Tumor-free samples have blue font labels and HCC samples have maroon font labels.WT-1, WT-2, WT-3 – wild-type liver samples from 6-month-old mice; KO-1, KO-2, KO-3 - <i>Iqgap2<sup>−/−</sup></i> liver samples from 6-month-old mice; WT-4, WT-5, WT-6 - wild-type liver samples from 24-month-old mice; and KO-4, KO-5, KO-6 - <i>Iqgap2<sup>−/−</sup></i> liver tumor samples from 24-month-old mice. Note that the three <i>Iqgap2<sup>−/−</sup></i> HCC tumor samples from 24-month-old mice show a distinct pattern and form a separate cluster. The rest of the samples have more similar transcript profiles with the highest similarity found between livers from the younger (6-month-old) mice irrespectively of genotype.</p
