We analyzed abundant mRNA array or deep sequencing data from clinical tumor tissue samples including breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer and liver cancer, and found that the mRNA levels of EMT-TFs including Zeb1, Zeb2, Snai1, Snai2 as well as Twist1 in tumor samples were not significantly altered compared to those in normal tissue or benign neoplasm, which were mismatched with the high protein levels of EMT-TFs in malignant tumors [18, 54, 55] or cancer cell lines (Fig 1B-C). Here, ZEB1 is linked to cancer.