Title: Rapid evolution of expression levels in hepatocellular carcinoma

Authors: Fan Zhang; Michael D. Kuo

Addresses: Vermont Biomedical Research Network and Department of Biology, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA; Institute for Translational Research and Department of Family Medicine, University of North Texas Health Science, Health Science Center, Fort Worth, TX 76107, USA ' Department of Diagnostic Radiology, University of Hong Kong, Room 406, Block K, Queen Mary Hospital, 102 Pok Fu Lam Rd, Hong Kong

Abstract: One interesting and important question when comparing and analysing human evolution and cancer evolution is whether cancer susceptibility is related to human evolution. Since cancer is an evolution on a small time and space scale, we compared and analysed liver gene expression data among orangutan, chimpanzee, human, nontumour 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 (HCC) 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.

Keywords: cancer evolution; gene expression analysis; pathway analysis; HCC; hepatocellular carcinoma; gene ontology; RNA-Seq; orangutan; chimpanzee; cancer development; biomarker discovery.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCBDD.2020.113830

International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2020 Vol.13 No.5/6, pp.454 - 474

Received: 27 Sep 2019
Accepted: 18 May 2020
Published online: 31 Mar 2021 *

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