Date of Award
2022
Document Type
Open Access Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Biological Sciences (MS)
Administrative Home Department
Department of Biological Sciences
Advisor 1
Paul Goetsch
Committee Member 1
Hairong Wei
Committee Member 2
Guiliang Tang
Abstract
Cancer testis genes are common targets for the development of immunotherapy for cancer treatment. Ovarian cancer is one of the leading causes of death in women cancer patients. Cancer testis genes play a role in tumorigenesis, but it is not clear how these genes are activated. This study utilized differential expression analysis between The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) ovarian cancer data, Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) non-cancerous ovary and testis data, and cell line data to identify a list of cancer testis genes that have a novel expression profile. To identify ovarian cancer testis genes, we obtained normal ovary tissue data and normal testis germline data from GTEx and cancerous ovarian tissue samples from TCGA. We defined a cancer testis gene if it matched an expression pattern of being differentially expressed in cancer and germline samples, as compared to normal tissue samples. The analysis discovered 4,578 genes that satisfied the condition of cancer testis genes. To facilitate downstream mechanistic analyses aimed to evaluate how these genes are misregulated, we identified 87 genes that satisfied the conditions in common ovarian cancer cell lines, as compared to human foreskin fibroblast normal cells. There were 28 genes found in common between both these lists that met our target expression profile whose misexpression will be evaluated in future studies.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Knuth, Zayne, "COMPARATIVE TRANSCRIPTOMIC ANALYSIS OF CANCER TESTIS GENES IN OVARIAN CANCER", Open Access Master's Thesis, Michigan Technological University, 2022.