Fig. 1

Overview of the epithelial-stromal co-expression network approach. Using laser capture microdissection gene expression profiling data from paired epithelial and stromal samples from cases of normal breast, ER-negative -IBC, and ER-positive -IBC (top panel), we constructed genome-wide epithelial-stromal co-expression networks (second panel), performed network visualization and functional enrichment analyses (third panel), and validated network predictions by several approaches, including measurement of protein expression by computational image analysis in the epithelium and stroma (bottom panel). In the top and second panels, red indicates epithelial tissue and data (respectively) and green indicates stromal tissue and data (respectively)