Systematic drug perturbations of cancer cells reveal diverse exit paths from the proliferative state

Analysis of the time courses of gene expression profiles of breast cancer cell line MCF7 treated by 16 differentiation-inducing drugs at day 1, day 3 and day 5. The drugs are the screening results from the the JHCCL library (1,500 drugs). The hypothesis tested in the present study was that cancer cells exit the proliferative state via multiple paths. Results showed that cell state transition trajectories firstly diverged and later converged to a quiescient differentiated state MCF7 cells were cultured in 150mm dishes and treated 1/5/10 μM of each of the 16 drugs (see details in Table S1-2). 14 plates of cells were left untreated as control samples. Cells were collected after 1, 3 and 5 days of drug treatment in RNeasy (Qiagen) lysis buffer and RNA was isolated according to the manufacture’s protocol and sent to Vancouver Prostate Center for transcript profiling.