Back

Loss of long-range co-expression is a common trait in cancer

Garcia-Cortes, D.; Hernandez-Lemus, E.; Espinal-Enriquez, J.

2022-10-28 cancer biology
10.1101/2022.10.27.513947 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Cancer cells display common features and enabling characteristics collectively known as the Hallmarks of Cancer, which occur alongside alterations in the regulatory mechanisms controlling gene transcription. Gene co-expression networks (GCNs) provide a framework to identify correlated gene sets that may share these regulatory mechanisms. Previously, we reported the loss of long-range co-expression in breast, lung, kidney, and hematopoietic cancer GCNs. Here, we expand the analysis to fifteen tissues, comprising 8,772 samples from two independent datasets. Unlike healthy phenotypes, cancer GCNs show that the strongest gene-pair interactions are intra-chromosomal, with their strength decaying as base-pair distance increases. Tumor GCN communities are strongly associated with cancerrelated processes and are enriched in gene families located on the same chromosome. In contrast, normal GCN communities are linked to metabolic and cell maintenance processes. Riboproteins remain highly co-expressed in both cancer and normal GCNs, highlighting their importance for cell viability. Notably, in other chronic diseases, such as Type-2 Diabetes and Alzheimers disease, the loss of long-range co-expression is absent, suggesting it is a distinctive feature of cancer.

Published in npj Systems Biology and Applications (predicted rank #10) · training set

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.