PATZ1 and thyroid gland carcinoma: Next, in order to deeply investigate a possible causal role of PATZ1 in thyroid cancer cell proliferation and other thyroid cancer cell functions, we transfected a PATZ1-EGFP-C2 plasmid carrying human PATZ1 variant 4 cDNA, or the empty vector pEGFP-C2 into the three thyroid cancer cell lines already used for the colony assays and selected mass populations and/or cell clones in which PATZ1 expression was stably up-regulated compared to parental cells transfected with the empty vector (supplementary Figure S1).