Multi - tissue analysis of gene expression patterns
in 24 tissues and changes in their cancers 
K.O. Greulich
together with Brigitte Altenberg, EMBL

Most experimental work is done with one or a few tissue types. Therefore it is never clear, how general statements derived from such experiments are.  In order to decide whether for example the overexpression of a given gene is a feature of cancer, an overview of cancer - relevant molecules in essentially all cancers need to be given. We use NIH’s database dbEST, which provides data on the expression of essentially all human genes in 51 normal tissues and their cancers. We selected 24 of these tissues, for which the statistical quality of the data is already sufficient to obtain robust results. The 24 tissues represent appox. 70 % of all clinical cancer cases

Major Results are

i ) The Warburg effect occurs only in selected tissues. This is the reason, why doubts had come up whether the Warburg effect is real at all.  The study solves that point.  Altenberg and Greulich,  PDF 2004 GENOMICS 84 1014 - 1020

ii) Among the 20 000 human genes only approx. 50 are upregulated in the majority of cancers. All other genes are upregulated only in a few selected cancer tissues  Altenberg, Gemuend and Greulich
2006 PROTEOMICS 6 67 - 71

iii) For sixty two p53 binding proteins the cumulated expression is surprisingly uniform. The expression in cancer is independent of the expression in normal tissue and is more uniform in cancer than in the 24 normal tissues  Altenberg, Rapp, Schmitt and Greulich 2006 GENOMICS 90 6661 - 6673

iv) The Database dbEST Correctly Predicts Gene Expression in Colon Cancer Patients 2008 Radeva M, Hofmann T, Altenberg B, Mothes H, Richter KK, Pool-Zobel B, Greulich KO   PDF 2008 CURR PHARM BIOT 2008, 9  509 - 514
 
 


Multi-tissue analysis of gene expression (PDF in house - Poster 2008)

Large homogeneity of ageing related genes in 24 human tissues HTML Poster Deutsche Gesellschaft für Zellbiologie 2007

          Multi-tissue analysis of genes related to   h u m a n  cancer and ageing  (PPT, LGSA lecture 2008)