The kinase ERK plays a conserved dominant role in the heterogeneity of epithelial-mesenchymal transition in pancreatic cancer cells

Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) occurs heterogeneously among malignant carcinoma cells to promote chemoresistance. Identifying the signaling pathways involved will nominate drug combinations to promote chemoresponse, but cell population-level studies are inherently fraught, and single-cell transcriptomics are limited to indirect ontology-based inferences. To understand EMT heterogeneity at a signaling protein level, we combined iterative indirect immunofluorescence imaging of pancreas cancer cells and tumors and mutual information (MI) analysis. Focusing first on MAP kinase pathways, MI indicated that cell-to-cell variation in ERK activity dominated control of EMT heterogeneity in response to diverse growth factors and chemotherapeutics, but that JNK compensated when MEK was inhibited. Population-level models could not capture these experimentally validated MI inferences. The dominant role of ERK was persistently indicated by MI even when analyzing seven potential EMT-regulating..., , , # The kinase ERK plays a conserved dominant role in the heterogeneity of epithelial-mesenchymal transition in pancreatic cancer cells

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.2280gb653](10.5061/dryad.2280gb653)

## Description of the data and file structure

Fluorescence intensity measurements from CellProfiler analysis of iterative indirect immunofluorescence imaging experiments measuring pathway activation proxies and cell phenotype markers. These data are used for mutual information analysis in our manuscript \"The kinase ERK plays a conserved dominant role in the heterogeneity of epithelial-mesenchymal transition in pancreatic cancer cells.\"

Each row is one object (cell) that was measured. Similar files ending in \_Cell, \_Cytoplasm, \_Nuclei, etc., can be merged using the Image and Object numbers from the dataset.

*VIP variables:*

* ImageNumber: Unique identifier for each image processed in the pipeline.
* ObjectNumber: Unique identifier for each object found in the associated image.
* Metad...