Figure 5. Pten-signature is represented in breast cancer stroma.

(a) Heat map displaying the expression of the human orthologs of the 70-gene subset in normal- and tumor-stroma from human breast cancer patients. The 70-gene subset derived from the mouse Pten-signature includes 57 genes upregulated (denoted by red bar on the y-axis) and 13 genes downregulated (denoted by the green bar on the y-axis). Red and green regions inside the heat map indicate relative gene expression levels (red, increased and green, decreased). The p-value indicates the ability of the mouse 70-gene signature to partition normal and tumor stroma in breast cancer patients (see Statistical Methods). The coded patient IDs are listed at the bottom.

(b) Venn diagram depicting the overlap between the mouse Pten-deleted fibroblast and human stroma microarray data sets. The 12 genes highlighted in red (Fig. 5a, right margin) are common between the mouse Pten 70 gene-signature and the human 163-gene signature that has been shown to associate with recurrence³⁸. This overlap is highly significant (p-value=2.5e⁻⁸; Fisher’s Exact Test).

(c) Representative Pten, P-Ets2^T72 and P-Akt^S473 IHC staining in human breast carcinoma samples from the tissue microarray. Scale bar represents 50 μm.

(d) Pearson correlations between Pten, P-Ets2^T72 and P-Akt^S473 expression based on Allred scores of a tissue microarray (Fig 5c) containing 99 patients with advanced breast carcinoma