Predicting tumor-suppressing genes in cancer via clustering the developmental stage gene expression profile

Abstract

In this paper we study the problem of predicting which genes are likely to have a role in tumor-suppression in lung and colorectal cancer. Mutation frequencies alone cannot serve to differentiate between ‘drivers’ (mutations that cause cancer) and ‘passengers’ (mutations that are caused by cancer) some other features must be added. Our hypothesis is that the developmental stage gene expression profile provides one such additional feature, that can potentially serve to differentiate between drivers and passengers. The developmental stage gene expression profile refers to the seven-dimensional vector of the gene's expression, as found in the Unigene database [15].