Disruption of Y chromosome expression in male lung cancer: discovery

Lung cancer is the single most frequent cause of cancer death worldwide and is relatively more common in males. For reasons that are currently unknown, lung cancer is also associated with significantly worse outcomes in men than women. Here we examine the pulmonary transcriptome in lung cancer at a systems level through network analysis. We compare gene expression networks in affected and unaffected tissue derived from 126 patients with lung cancer. Examination of tissue-specific co-expression patterns reveals markedly poor preservation of a sex-associated gene co-expression network in tumor tissue. Human whole transcriptome data were generated from pulmonary tumor and, where possible, matched unaffected tissue (referred to hereon as ‘normal’) using the Affymetrix HuGene 1.1 ST microarray, giving a total of 237 samples from 126 patients. Tumor samples and adjacent normal lung tissue were donated from surgical resections, undertaken with curative intent.