Department of Peripheral Vascular Intervention, Aerospace Center Hospital, Beijing, China.
J Cell Biochem. 2019 Jun;120(6):10855-10863. doi: 10.1002/jcb.28377. Epub 2019 Feb 19.
Lung cancer is a worldwide disease and highly heterogeneous at a molecular level. In this study, we both performed the pathway enrichment analysis and the transcriptome-based weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA) so as to find the critical pathways involved in lung cancer. Our analysis results indicated that genes in viability modules (0 < Z-summary < 2) selected by WGCNA were more reliable for identifying crucial pathways, while gene enrichment analysis provided a wide range of pathways with a little emphasis on target pathways for lung cancer. On the basis of genes, which were classified into various modules by WGCNA, we found a significant aberration of glucose metabolism in lung cancer cells, demonstrating that the glucose metabolism has been perturbed, especially the glycolysis pathway. Our study revealed that disordered glucose metabolism might be closely associated with the carcinogenesis of lung cancer based on the integrated analysis of WGCNA and metabolomics, which could be a potential therapeutic target for lung cancer.
肺癌是一种全球性疾病，在分子水平上具有高度异质性。在这项研究中，我们既进行了通路富集分析，也进行了基于转录组的加权基因共表达网络分析（WGCNA），以寻找涉及肺癌的关键通路。我们的分析结果表明，WGCNA 选择的生存力模块（0 < Z-summary < 2）中的基因更有助于识别关键通路，而基因富集分析则提供了广泛的通路，但对肺癌的目标通路关注较少。基于 WGCNA 将基因分类到不同模块，我们发现肺癌细胞中葡萄糖代谢存在显著异常，表明葡萄糖代谢已经失调，特别是糖酵解途径。我们的研究表明，基于 WGCNA 和代谢组学的综合分析，紊乱的葡萄糖代谢可能与肺癌的癌变密切相关，这可能是肺癌的一个潜在治疗靶点。
