Bioinformatics Analysis Reveals Connection of Squamous Cell Carcinoma and Adenocarcinoma of the Lung

Abstract

Squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma are the major histological types of non-small cell lung cancer.Because they differ on the basis of histopathological and clinical characteristics and their relationship withsmoking, their etiologies may be different; for example, different tumor suppressor genes may be related to thegenesis of each type. We used microarray data to construct three regulatory networks to identify potential genesrelated to lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma and investigated the similarity and specificity ofthem. In the network, some of the observed transcription factors and target genes had been previously provento be related to lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. We also found some new transcriptionfactors and target genes related to SCC. The results demonstrated that regulatory network analysis is useful inconnection analysis between lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma.