Structural Analysis of Leukemia Related Gene Network

Genome forms gene networks in the complicated interactive ways and further study on the cancer-related gene networks can help to understand and predict many unknown biological functions of cancer-related genome, and then obtain the useful informations about molecular mechanism of the formation of cancer. In this research, using the method of mutual information, we construct gene networks corresponding to normal control group and diseased experimental group of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (abbreviated as ALL). Through contrasting the structure difference of two kinds of networks, we find 23 structural key genes of ALL with significant degree-difference, where 21 genes are confirmed to be closely related to the formation of ALL. The match ratio between the prediction by model and literature is up to 91.3%. According to the effectiveness of the method in this work, we can predict that the remaining two genes CXCL1 and TACSTD2 are closely related to ALL. The significant differences of the network structures between control and experimental groups will enlighten the biomedical scientists that the reason of normal organism suffering from leukemia may be the great changes of some genes in vivo. The finding of structural key genes of ALL will help the biomedical scientists to further research the pathogenesis of ALL.