Moreover, USF1 was positively associated with lymph node metastasis (p < 0.001) (Fig. 4h) and the survival data of breast cancer patients from KM-plotter (http://kmplot.com/analysis/) indicated that higher USF1 expression had significantly worse overall survival (p < 0.001) and distant metastasis-free survival (p = 0.013) (Additional file 1: Figure S9C-D). Here, USF1 is linked to metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes.