Figure 1: Overview of the study.
From: Cell type-specific properties and environment shape tissue specificity of cancer genes
(A) Some cancer genes (e.g. BRCA1) are only found mutated in certain types of cancers while general-cancer genes (e.g. p53) are associated with cancers from many different tissue origins. (B) A cancer gene specificity score was computed for each gene implementing the intuition that a high significance in a single tumor type and a low significance in the pan-cancer set are indicative of a specific-cancer gene. (C) The ranking of cancer genes by specificity was used to computationally detect functions that are predominantly associated with specific-cancer genes as compared to general ones (and vice versa) using a variant of the GSEA algorithm. (D) Proteins were grouped by the tissues in which they are involved in the development of cancer. Environmental chemicals and viral proteins frequently interacting with genes associated with one type of cancer were detected.
