Figure 4

Genes associated with hormone independence in both breast and prostate cancer are enriched for transcriptional targets of the EGFR signaling pathway. (A) Heat map representation for 81 unique genes in the common signature of hormone independence (from Figures 1 and 2). The patterns corresponding to these genes are shown in the breast and prostate cell line profile datasets and in a dataset from Creighton et al. [21] of MCF-7 cell lines with activated oncogenes HER2, MEK, Raf, or EGFR. The order of the genes is the same for the datasets. The set of genes both associated with ER- and AS cell lines and activated by EGFR (p<0.01) are highlighted. (B) Classification of the breast and prostate cell lines as "EGFR-like" or "ERBB2-like," using the entire sets of genes from the Creighton dataset that were differentially expressed (p<0.01, irrespective of the Bild and Zhao datasets) in the EGFR or HER2 MCF-7 cell lines, respectively, as compared to controls. Genes and associated expression values are available in Additional File 3.