Single Cell Analyses of Cancer Cells Identified Two Regulatorily and Functionally Distinct Categories in Differentially Expressed Genes Among Tumor Subclones

Overview

Journal Heliyon

Specialty Social Sciences

Date 2024 Mar 25

PMID 38524605

Authors

Wei Cao

Xuefei Wang

Kaiwen Luo

Yang Li

Jiahong Sun

Ruqing Fu

Qi Zhang

Ni Hong

Edwin Cheung

Wenfei Jin

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

To explore the feature of cancer cells and tumor subclones, we analyzed 101,065 single-cell transcriptomes from 12 colorectal cancer (CRC) patients and 92 single cell genomes from one of these patients. We found cancer cells, endothelial cells and stromal cells in tumor tissue expressed much more genes and had stronger cell-cell interactions than their counterparts in normal tissue. We identified copy number variations (CNVs) in each cancer cell and found correlation between gene copy number and expression level in cancer cells at single cell resolution. Analysis of tumor subclones inferred by CNVs showed accumulation of mutations in each tumor subclone along lineage trajectories. We found differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between tumor subclones had two populations: DEG and DEG. DEG, showing high CNV-expression correlation and whose expression differences depend on the differences of CNV level, enriched in housekeeping genes and cell adhesion associated genes. DEG, showing low CNV-expression correlation and mainly in low CNV variation regions and regions without CNVs, enriched in cytokine signaling genes. Furthermore, cell-cell communication analyses showed that DEG tends to involve in cell-cell contact while DEG tends to involve in secreted signaling, which further support that DEG and DEG are two regulatorily and functionally distinct categories.

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