Fig. 5

Stability of the primary human breast tumor functional proteomic “fingerprint” despite variability resulting from intratumoral heterogeneity and tissue handling/time to tumor freezing. The overall total and phosphoprotein expression pattern or “signature” was determined by unsupervised hierarchical clustering of data derived from reverse phase protein array (RPPA) analysis of ten primary human breast tumors using the antibodies shown in Table 1. This “signature” was faithfully preserved in the majority of cases a across three separate immediately (snap) frozen (time 0) sections derived from each tumor (FT01–10) and b across nine separate sections frozen at increasing time delays after surgical resection up to 24 h. Note that all sections derived from the same tumor are designated with the same color and that sections derived from different tumors are designated with different colors in the figure. In b, the p = 0.05 bar indicates the position to the right of which dendrogram branches that emerge from the same node represent samples that have statistically similar functional proteomic “fingerprints” (at p ≤ 0.05)