The specificity of the antibodies used in our study and the pattern of epithelial and mesenchymal markers in breast cancer cell lines are presented in Figure 2, while the range and mean values calculated for epithelial (keratins, EpCAM) and mesenchymal (vimentin, fibronectin) markers in these cell lines are shown in Table 1 and Additional file 2. The gene discussed is VIM; the disease is breast cancer.