Human breast tumours are diverse in their natural history and in their responsiveness to treatments. Variation in transcriptional programs accounts for much of the biological diversity of human cells and tumours. In each cell, signal transduction and regulatory systems transduce information from the cell's identity to its environmental status, thereby controlling the level of expression of every gene in the genome. Here we have characterized variation in gene expression patterns in a set of 65 surgical specimens of human breast tumours from 42 different individuals, using complementary DNA microarrays representing 8,102 human genes. These patterns provided a distinctive molecular portrait of each tumour. Twenty of the tumours were sampled twice, before and after a 16-week course of doxorubicin chemotherapy, and two tumours were paired with a lymph node metastasis from the same patient. Gene expression patterns in two tumour samples from the same individual were almost always more similar to each other than either was to any other sample. Sets of co-expressed genes were identified for which variation in messenger RNA levels could be related to specific features of physiological variation. The tumours could be classified into subtypes distinguished by pervasive differences in their gene expression patterns.

following correction should be noted. In Fig. 1b, the designed sequence of amino acids S 36 contains a typographical error in that only 35 of its 36 monomers appear. The missing amino acid is of type R and should be located between amino acids E (sixth) and G (seventh). The correct sequence is:Although this typographical error does not change the results presented in the paper because they were obtained with the correct number and sequence of amino acids, it constitutes a nuisance for anybody interested in reproducing our results, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We want to thank Prof. H. S. Chan, of the University of Toronto, for calling our attention to this error.Cell Biology. In the article "Quantitative analysis of biological membrane lipids at the low picomole level by nanoelectrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry" by B. Brügger, G. Erben, R. Sandhoff, F. T. Wieland, and W. D.Lehmann, which appeared in number 6, March 18, 1997, of Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (94,(2339)(2340)(2341)(2342)(2343)(2344), Table 1

The purpose of this study was to classify breast carcinomas based on variations in gene expression patterns derived from cDNA microarrays and to correlate tumor characteristics to clinical outcome. A total of 85 cDNA microarray experiments representing 78 cancers, three fibroadenomas, and four normal breast tissues were analyzed by hierarchical clustering. As reported previously, the cancers could be classified into a basal epithelial-like group, an ERBB2-overexpressing group and a normal breast-like group based on variations in gene expression. A novel finding was that the previously characterized luminal epithelial͞estrogen receptorpositive group could be divided into at least two subgroups, each with a distinctive expression profile. These subtypes proved to be reasonably robust by clustering using two different gene sets: first, a set of 456 cDNA clones previously selected to reflect intrinsic properties of the tumors and, second, a gene set that highly correlated with patient outcome. Survival analyses on a subcohort of patients with locally advanced breast cancer uniformly treated in a prospective study showed significantly different outcomes for the patients belonging to the various groups, including a poor prognosis for the basal-like subtype and a significant difference in outcome for the two estrogen receptor-positive groups.