Description
We performed expression profiling of 36 types of normal human tissues and identified 2,503 tissue-specific genes. We then systematically studied the expression of these genes in cancers by re-analyzing a large collection of published DNA microarray datasets. Our study shows that integration of each gene's breadth of expression (BOE) in normal tissues is important for biological interpretation of the expression profiles of cancers in terms of tumor differentiation, cell lineage and metastasis.