Gao Bo, Zhao Yue, Gao Yonghang, Li Guojun, Wu Ling-Yun
IAM MADIS NCMIS Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190 China.
School of Mathematics Shandong University Jinan 250100 China.
Glob Chall. 2021 Jun 19;5(9):2100006. doi: 10.1002/gch2.202100006. eCollection 2021 Sep.
High-throughput biological data has created an unprecedented opportunity for illuminating the mechanisms of tumor emergence and evolution. An important and challenging problem in deciphering cancers is to investigate the commonalities of driver genes and pathways and the associations between cancers. Aiming at this problem, a tool ComCovEx is developed to identify common cancer driver gene modules between two cancers by searching for the candidates in local signaling networks using an exclusivity-coverage iteration strategy and outputting those with significant coverage and exclusivity for both cancers. The associations of the cancer pairs are further evaluated by Fisher's exact test. Being applied to 11 TCGA cancer datasets, ComCovEx identifies 13 significantly associated cancer pairs with plenty of biologically significant common gene modules. The novel results of cancer relationship and common gene modules reveal the relevant pathological basis of different cancer types and provide new clues to diagnosis and drug treatment in associated cancers.
高通量生物学数据为阐明肿瘤发生和演变机制创造了前所未有的机会。在解读癌症过程中,一个重要且具有挑战性的问题是研究驱动基因和信号通路的共性以及癌症之间的关联。针对这一问题,开发了一种工具ComCovEx,通过使用排他性-覆盖迭代策略在局部信号网络中搜索候选基因,来识别两种癌症之间的常见癌症驱动基因模块,并输出对两种癌症都具有显著覆盖度和排他性的模块。癌症对之间的关联通过Fisher精确检验进一步评估。将ComCovEx应用于11个TCGA癌症数据集时,它识别出13对显著相关的癌症对以及大量具有生物学意义的常见基因模块。癌症关系和常见基因模块的新结果揭示了不同癌症类型的相关病理基础,并为相关癌症的诊断和药物治疗提供了新线索。