The phrase "aggressive signatures" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts discussing bold or assertive styles of signing documents or in metaphorical language referring to strong or forceful agreements.
Example: "The contract was finalized with aggressive signatures from both parties, indicating their firm commitment to the terms."
Alternatives: "forceful signatures" or "assertive signatures".
For the test data, the sets of tumors expressing high levels of the aggressive signature were defined as the upper quartile of tumors from any given test set with the highest average gene-wise mean-centered expression of the aggressive signature set.
Interestingly, a subgroup of the primary tumours (C7, C11, C19 and C13) clustered under the metastatic arm with a group of miRNAs that follow the same pattern of expression, suggesting that they have an inherited aggressive signature.
Analysis of the relative proportions of metastasis in patients exhibiting high expression of the aggressive signature to those that did not, failed to show any statistically significant difference (data not shown).
Lung tumor data from the same study indicates a similar trend where patients with tumors expressing high levels of the aggressive signature have reduced disease-free survival (mean estimated survival 29 months versus 54 months, P < 0.001, Figure 5Biv).
Similarly, using bone metastasis data from the same study, the high aggressive signature expressing tumors were associated with reduced metastasis-free survival in patients (mean estimated survival 6.4 years versus 9.3 years, P < 0.05; Figure 5Bii).
Analysis of a second breast tumor data set [ 44] also shows that patients whose tumors express high levels of the aggressive signature genes have a reduced disease-free survival (mean estimated survival 71 months versus 106 months, P < 0.02; Figure 5Biii).
Analysis of tumors expressing the highest levels of the aggressive signature genes in the breast tumor set from Minn et al., [ 43] indicated that the patients from whom the tumors were derived had reduced disease-free survival with respect to lung metastasis (mean estimated survival 5.4 years versus 10.1 years, P < 0.001; Figure 5Bi).
To validate the value of identified proteins and their networks as predictive biomarkers of the aggressiveness of a given tumour, we further explored aggressive and non-aggressive signatures by extracting dependencies that were common to the networks of proteins among cases, and for species in the data sets deposited at the ArrayExpression database of EBI.
The common set of 42 genes identified from the two training sets defined the aggressive gene signature.
Several genes of the DNA damage and stress responses are included in the 42 genes of the aggressive tumor signature.
