Rapid Evolution of Expression Levels in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

The human evolution and cancer evolution have been researched for several years, but little is known about the molecular similarities between human and cancer evolution. One interesting and important question when comparing and analyzing human evolution and cancer evolution is whether cancer susceptibility is related to human evolution. There are a few microarray studies on human evolution or cancer development. Yet, to date, no microarray studies have been performed with both. Since cancer is an evolution on a small time and space scale, we compared and analyzed liver gene expression data among orangutan, chimpanzee, human, nontumor tissue, and primary cancer using linear mixed model, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Gene Ontology (GO), and Human Evolution Based Cancer Gene Expression Analysis. Our results revealed not only rapid evolution of expression levels in hepatocellular carcinoma relative to the gene expression evolution rate of human, but also the correlation between human specific gene expression and cancer specific gene expression. Further gene ontology analysis also suggested statistical relationship between gene function and expression pattern might help understanding the relationship between human evolution and cancer development.