To determine whether or not the overexpression of HSF1-CanSig 8q genes in cancers is related to synteny, we analyzed the expression pattern of genes flanking HSF1 (genomic coordinates of HSF1’s neighboring genes can be found in Additional file 1: Table S7) in each cancer case to shed light on the clustering of HSF1-CanSig 8q genes. Here, HSF1 is linked to cancer.