E2F1 and nonpapillary renal cell carcinoma: By analyzing a public dataset of 533 ccRCC patients from TCGA, we found that SALL4 mRNA level was significantly correlated with the transcripts of genes related to proliferation, senescence and cell cycle, including CCNE1 (r = 0.4145, P < 0.0001), CDK3 (r = 0.3811, P < 0.0001), E2F1 (r = 0.3302, P < 0.0001) and RB1 (r = − 0.3032, P < 0.0001) (Fig. 2f-i and Additional file 3: Figure S3, Additional file 4: Table S1).