Fig. 4

Comparison of normal human breast epithelial miRNA signatures with miRNA profiles of different breast cancer subtypes. a The miRNA signatures of human mammary epithelial subsets were used to identify relationships between normal human epithelial subsets and tumors of different molecular subtypes. The miRNA signature scores of epithelial subsets were derived as MS vs LP+ML; LP vs MS+ML and ML vs MS+LP (MS MaSC/basal, LP luminal progenitor, ML mature luminal). Panels show boxplots for the LP, MS and ML signature expression scores with respect to the miRNA signatures of tumor subtypes derived from the TCGA database (breast cancer subtype: LumA luminal A, LumB luminal B, HER2 Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 positive, Basal often triple negative tumors). b Expression of basal-restricted, primate-specific miRNAs was examined in the different subtypes of breast cancer using the TCGA dataset. Boxplots are shown for miRNA-516a and miR-519a, where significant enrichment was observed in the basal-like subtype. CPM, counts per million