Fig. 1

Untargeted LC‒MS metabolomics analysis of primary liver cancer. A Volcano plot of the Ctrl and HCC groups. The horizontal axis of the graph represents the log2 value of the fold change (FC), and the vertical axis represents the -log10 value of the significance P value. Significantly different metabolites are presented in red if they satisfy FC > 1.5 and P value < 0.05; metabolites are presented in blue if they satisfy FC< 0.67 and P value < 0.05. Nonsignificantly different metabolites are presented in gray. B Hierarchical clustering analysis of Ctrl and HCC samples. C Unsupervised PCA score plots of metabolomic phenotypes between the Ctrl and HCC groups. Model parameter: R2X = 0.81 (cumulative variance proportion of 2 principal components). D Score plot of the OPLS-DA model to maximize the intergroup differentiation of the metabolomic data between the Ctrl and HCC groups. Model parameters: 1 predictive component + 1 orthogonal component, R2Y = 0.832, and Q2 = 0.771. E OPLS‒DA permutation test diagram of the Ctrl and HCC groups. F ROC plot of the OPLS-DA model differentiating the Ctrl and HCC groups. G Hierarchical clustering heatmap of differentially abundant metabolites between the Ctrl and HCC groups. H Correlation heatmaps of differentially abundant metabolites between the Ctrl and HCC groups. I KEGG pathway enrichment diagram (bar chart)