Interestingly, transcript levels of autophagy genes were not evenly distributed amongst the different tumor subtypes and we identified a transcriptional autophagy signature (ATG5, LC3B, ATG2B, BECN1, IRF1) of BC concordant in microarrays A, microarrays plus2, RNA-seq TCGA and this signature was also confirmed in a small independent cohort using ddPCR. This evidence concerns the gene IRF1 and breast cancer.