Abstract

BackgroundProstate cancer is a world wide leading cancer and it is characterized by its aggressive metastasis. According to the clinical heterogeneity, prostate cancer displays different stages and grades related to the aggressive metastasis disease. Although numerous studies used microarray analysis and traditional clustering method to identify the individual genes during the disease processes, the important gene regulations remain unclear. We present a computational method for inferring genetic regulatory networks from micorarray data automatically with transcription factor analysis and conditional independence testing to explore the potential significant gene regulatory networks that are correlated with cancer, tumor grade and stage in the prostate cancer.ResultsTo deal with missing values in microarray data, we used a K-nearest-neighbors (KNN) algorithm to determine the precise expression values. We applied web services technology to wrap the bioinformatics toolkits and databases to automatically extract the promoter regions of DNA sequences and predicted the transcription factors that regulate the gene expressions. We adopt the microarray datasets consists of 62 primary tumors, 41 normal prostate tissues from Stanford Microarray Database (SMD) as a target dataset to evaluate our method. The predicted results showed that the possible biomarker genes related to cancer and denoted the androgen functions and processes may be in the development of the prostate cancer and promote the cell death in cell cycle. Our predicted results showed that sub-networks of genes SREBF1, STAT6 and PBX1 are strongly related to a high extent while ETS transcription factors ELK1, JUN and EGR2 are related to a low extent. Gene SLC22A3 may explain clinically the differentiation associated with the high grade cancer compared with low grade cancer. Enhancer of Zeste Homolg 2 (EZH2) regulated by RUNX1 and STAT3 is correlated to the pathological stage.ConclusionsWe provide a computational framework to reconstruct the genetic regulatory network from the microarray data using biological knowledge and constraint-based inferences. Our method is helpful in verifying possible interaction relations in gene regulatory networks and filtering out incorrect relations inferred by imperfect methods. We predicted not only individual gene related to cancer but also discovered significant gene regulation networks. Our method is also validated in several enriched published papers and databases and the significant gene regulatory networks perform critical biological functions and processes including cell adhesion molecules, androgen and estrogen metabolism, smooth muscle contraction, and GO-annotated processes. Those significant gene regulations and the critical concept of tumor progression are useful to understand cancer biology and disease treatment.

Highlights

  • Prostate cancer is a world wide leading cancer and it is characterized by its aggressive metastasis

  • There are 66% of the genes with above 80% consistent expression and 99.4% of the genes with above 50% consistent expression across similar samples and more genes with consistent gene expressions will help us to identify the relations between pair of genes correctly

  • The transcription factors as biomarkers (PBX1, EP300, STAT6, SREBF1, NFKB1, STAT3, EGR1, E2F3, NR2F2) see Additional file 3 are only involved in the cancer networks and those genes are annotated in cancer-related transcription regulatory factors (p-value 1.18E-9)

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Summary

Introduction

Prostate cancer is a world wide leading cancer and it is characterized by its aggressive metastasis. We present a computational method for inferring genetic regulatory networks from micorarray data automatically with transcription factor analysis and conditional independence testing to explore the potential significant gene regulatory networks that are correlated with cancer, tumor grade and stage in the prostate cancer. The first one is searching and scoring method, which computes the conditional probability of each network given the data, ranks the networks and searches the best network that can fit the data The advantage of this approach is the result of network graph with fine-grained probabilistic information but the drawback of this approach is the number of possible networks becomes super-exponential when the number of nodes is very large. Since the constraint-based learning method needs to get all the conditional independencies which are developed to measure the relationship of dependencies, it is a hard work to generate the while possible assembling patterns among genes in the microarray data

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