Microarray Data Analysis of Perturbed Pathways in Breast Cancer Tissues

Abstract

Due to the polygenic nature of cancer, it is believed that breast cancer is caused by the perturbation of multiple genes and their complex interactions, which contribute to the wide aspects of disease phenotypes. A systems biology approach for the identification of subnetworks of interconnected genes as functional modules is required to understand the complex nature of diseases such as breast cancer. In this study, we apply a 3-step strategy for the interpretation of microarray data, focusing on identifying significantly perturbed metabolic pathways rather than analyzing a large amount of overexpressed and underexpressed individual genes. The selected pathways are considered to be dysregulated functional modules that putatively contribute to the progression of disease. The subnetwork of protein-protein interactions for these dysregulated pathways are constructed for further detailed analysis. We evaluated the method by analyzing microarray datasets of breast cancer tissues; i.e., normal and invasive breast cancer tissues. Using the strategy of microarray analysis, we selected several significantly perturbed pathways that are implicated in the regulation of progression of breast cancers, including the extracellular matrix-receptor interaction pathway and the focal adhesion pathway. Moreover, these selected pathways include several known breast cancer-related genes. It is concluded from this study that the present strategy is capable of selecting interesting perturbed pathways that putatively play a role in the progression of breast cancer and provides an improved interpretability of networks of protein-protein interactions.