MITF expression was significantly reduced in SK-MEL-28 and 501mel cells, but not in A375 cells, upon SOX10 depletion, suggesting that SOX10 mediated repression of DIRC3 occurs, at least in part, independent from its regulation of MITF. Consistent with these findings, analysis of DIRC3, MITF and SOX10 expression across the 471 TCGA melanoma RNA-seq samples showed that DIRC3 levels negatively correlate with both MITF and SOX10 in melanoma patients, with DIRC3 expression being especially high in those tumours with the lowest MITF (Fig 2D) or SOX10 (Fig 2E) expression. Here, SOX10 is linked to neoplasm.