Stimulation of endogenous FGFR2 signalling in estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer cells

Genome-wide association studies have identified a locus within the second intron of the FGFR2 gene that is consistently the most strongly associated with estrogen receptor-poisive breast cancer risk. However, we know little about the mechanisms by which the FGFR2 locus mediates risk or the pathways in which multiple risk loci may combine to cause disease. Previously, a systems biology approach was adopted to elucidate the regulatory networks operating in MCF-7 breast cancer cells in order to examine the role of FGFR2 in mediating risk. Here, the same approach has been employed using a number of different estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer cell lines in order to see if the previous findings are reproducible and consistent in estrogen receptor-positive disease. The data consists of 43 microarray samples from 5 estrogen receptor-positive cell lines (MCF-7, ZR751, T47D, SUM52PE and BT474) treated under different conditions at a time point of 6 h in order to perturb FGFR2 signalling. The data have been pre-processed in R using the beadarray package, and are presented in the form of log2 expression values. The experiment was carried out on 4 Humanv4 arrays using 12 samples per array.