Fig. 2

Immunoreactivity of BRK increased significantly with tumor grade and stage. a BRK expression was determined via immunohistochemistry (IHC) analyses on a 6 cases/24 cores breast cancer tissue microarray (TMA) (BR243d, USBIOMAX, USA) with matched adjacent normal breast tissue, and includes information about TNM, clinical stage and pathology grade. b BRK expression was determined by IHC analyses on a breast cancer tissue array, BR10010a (USBIOMAX, USA). The TMA contained a 50 cases/100 cores array containing 50 invasive carcinoma samples and matched lymph node metastasis samples. BRK expression increases with metastatic index. Samples 1–50 and samples 51–100 show the strength of BRK expression in 0–3+ scale in invasive ductal carcinoma and in metastatic breast carcinoma tissue, respectively. Anti-BRK antibody was used to stain the tissue sections and specific binding was detected with ImmPRESS TM reagent followed by color development in peroxidase substrate DAB (3,3′-diaminobenzidine). c Represents the average of the total number of samples that stained positively for BRK in all IDC samples versus metastatic carcinoma samples, and d the average total intensity for BRK in all IDC samples versus metastatic carcinoma samples