Journal article
Disruption of metazoan gene regulatory networks in cancer alters the balance of co-expression between genes of unicellular and multicellular origins
AS Trigos, F Bongiovanni, Y Zhang, M Zethoven, R Tothill, R Pearson, AT Papenfuss, DL Goode
Genome Biology | BMC | Published : 2024
Abstract
Background: Metazoans inherited genes from unicellular ancestors that perform essential biological processes such as cell division, metabolism, and protein translation. Multicellularity requires careful control and coordination of these unicellular genes to maintain tissue integrity and homeostasis. Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that arose during metazoan evolution are frequently altered in cancer, resulting in over-expression of unicellular genes. We propose that an imbalance in co-expression of unicellular (UC) and multicellular (MC) genes is a driving force in cancer. Results: We combine gene co-expression analysis to infer changes to GRNs in cancer with protein sequence conservation da..
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Awarded by Peter MacCallum Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the Research Computing Facility at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre for providing the infrastructure and support to carry out this project. We thank Dr. Kimberly Bussey, Prof. Kieran Harvey, and Prof. David Bowtell for the critical reading of the manuscript. We thank Prof. Mark Rosenthal for the inspiration for the brain cancer analysis and Dr. Benjamin Goudey and Dr. Thomas Conway for suggesting the random forest approach. We thank Mikhail Dias for designing the diagrams and Yuzhou Feng for helping with the code and data sharing. We thank Anna Small and Jodie Kirkland for their assistance with manuscript preparation.