Notch Pathway: Bioinformatic Analysis of Related Transcription Factors within Bladder Cancer Types and Subtypes

Abstract

BackgroundThe Notch signaling is a highly conserved pathway that plays an essential role in many processes such as cell growth, differentiation... The behavior of regulators within Notch signaling pathway has been studied in several cancers. However, a few one have focused on some Notch regulators in bladder cancer. The aim of this study is to investigate the behavior of regulators related to Notch signaling pathway within bladder cancer subtypes MethodsWe used three public data sets of transcriptomic data to investigate the behavior of regulators related to Notch signaling pathway within bladder cancer subtypes. The processing of the data sets was carried out with the appropriate R/Bioconductor package for each data set. We used the graphite R/Bioconductor package for the construction of Notch signaling pathway and CoRegNet package to estimate the activity of transcription factors. ResultsWe have found that some regulators have high activity in the luminal subtype and within NIMBC and low activity in the basal one and vice versa for the other regulators. Moreover, we found that NOTCH3 does not have the same activity in muscle invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) and non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). ConclusionNotch signaling pathway regulators do not have the same activity within the different subtypes of bladder cancer and they can be divided into two groups that behave inversely. We showed for the first time that NOTCH3 does not have the same activity within bladder cancer categories and subtypes.