Identification of activated pathways in lung adenocarcinoma based on network strategy

Lung adenocarcinoma has increased incidence over the past years and is the cause for almost 50% of deaths attributable to lung cancer. The objective of this paper is to identify activated pathways associated with lung adenocarcinoma based on gene co-expression network analysis.

Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analysis of dysregulated genes was performed based on Expression Analysis Systematic Explorer test to illuminate the biological pathways. Co-expression networks of lung adenocarcinoma in different tumor Stages (IA, IB, IIA, IIB, IIIA, IIIB, and IV) were constructed by Empirical Bayes approach to reweight gene pair scores. Pathway activity analysis was conducted to compute the distribution of pathways in different stages and to identify "activated" pathways in lung adenocarcinoma.

We evaluated 211 dysregulated genes between lung adenocarcinoma patients and normal controls. Pathway activity analysis was performed and P values of pathways, which obtained from co-expression networks (Stage IA, IB, IIA, IIB, IIIA, IIIB, and IV), were calculated. Cell cycle, progesterone-mediated oocyte maturation, and oocyte meiosis were activated during all stages in lung adenocarcinoma.

We successfully identified three activated pathways (cell cycle, progesterone-mediated oocyte maturation, and oocyte meiosis) in different Stages (IA, IB, IIA, IIB, IIIA, IIIB, and IV) of lung adenocarcinoma.