Extracting consistent knowledge from highly inconsistent cancer gene data sources

Background: Hundreds of genes that are causally implicated in oncogenesis have been found and collected in various databases. For efficient application of these abundant but diverse data sources, it is of fundamental importance to evaluate their consistency. Results: First, we showed that the lists of cancer genes from some major data sources were highly inconsistent in terms of overlapping genes. In particular, most cancer genes accumulated in previous small-scale studies could not be rediscovered in current high-throughput genome screening studies. Then, based on a metric proposed in this study, we showed that most cancer gene lists from different data sources were highly functionally consistent. Finally, we extracted functionally consistent cancer genes from various data sources and collected them in our database F-Census. Conclusions: Although they have very low gene overlapping, most cancer gene data sources are highly consistent at the functional level, which indicates that they...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Xue Gong, Ruihong Wu, Yuannv Zhang, Wenyuan Zhao, Lixin Cheng, Yunyan Gu, Lin Zhang, Jing Wang 0004, Jing Zhu, Zheng Guo
• Keywords: BMCBI 2010, Cancer Genes, Consistent Cancer Genes, Data Sources