1. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02141, USA
2. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
3. MIT Center for Cancer Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
4. Department of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
5. Department of Pathology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee 38105, USA
6. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
7. *These authors contributed equally to this work
8. †Present address: Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK, Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1QN, UK

Correspondence to: Todd R. Golub^1,4,6 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to T.R.G. (Email: golub@broad.mit.edu).
Information miRNA expression data have been submitted to the Gene Expression Omnibus under the series accession number GSE2564.

Recent work has revealed the existence of a class of small non-coding RNA species, known as microRNAs (miRNAs), which have critical functions across various biological processes^{1, 2}. Here we use a new, bead-based flow cytometric miRNA expression profiling method to present a systematic expression analysis of 217 mammalian miRNAs from 334 samples, including multiple human cancers. The miRNA profiles are surprisingly informative, reflecting the developmental lineage and differentiation state of the tumours. We observe a general downregulation of miRNAs in tumours compared with normal tissues. Furthermore, we were able to successfully classify poorly differentiated tumours using miRNA expression profiles, whereas messenger RNA profiles were highly inaccurate when applied to the same samples. These findings highlight the potential of miRNA profiling in cancer diagnosis.

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