Network-based metabolic characterization of renal cell carcinoma

An emerging hallmark of cancer is metabolic reprogramming, which presents opportunities for cancer diagnosis and treatment based on metabolism. We performed a comprehensive metabolic network analysis of major renal cell carcinoma (RCC) subtypes including clear cell, papillary and chromophobe by integrating transcriptomic data with the human genome-scale metabolic model to understand the coordination of metabolic pathways in cancer cells. We identified metabolic alterations of each subtype with respect to tumor-adjacent normal samples and compared them to understand the differences between subtypes. We found that genes of amino acid metabolism and redox homeostasis are significantly altered in RCC subtypes. Chromophobe showed metabolic divergence compared to other subtypes with upregulation of genes involved in glutamine anaplerosis and aspartate biosynthesis. A difference in transcriptional regulation involving HIF1A is observed between subtypes. We identified E2F1 and FOXM1 as other major transcriptional activators of metabolic genes in RCC. Further, the co-expression pattern of metabolic genes in each patient showed the variations in metabolism within RCC subtypes. We also found that co-expression modules of each subtype have tumor stage-specific behavior, which may have clinical implications.