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Human-specific genes in acute lymphoid leukemia
(Message 3324)
Posted 24 Nov 2023 by GloriaLugoboni Hi to everyone! We are a group of master's students from the course of Biological Data Mining at the University of Trento. We are investigating Human-specific genes and linked diseases. These genes represent a subset of genes that can be found only in humans and that are not found in our close relatives, the chimpanzee. There have been studies to identify these genes and understand their role in our development and their connection to diseases and tumor formation. At the moment, it is a field yet to be completely discovered and needs further analysis. In our project, we decided to focus on the role of human-specific genes in the context of Acute Lymphoid Leukemia (ALL), a type of liquid tumor that is highly common in children (80% of the patients are less than 18 years old). We specifically identified 122 human-specific genes up and down-regulated in this disease. We generated our dataset by merging different cohorts. We utilized/combined five different cohorts that group samples from pediatric and adult cases of ALL plus adult and pediatric controls. We have a total of 670 samples, of which 30 are controls. For each sample, we have a total of 13155 genes, all characterized by their gene name. Our final objective is to expand the network and if possible infer casual relationships to be able to define new genes of interest in terms of ALL and human-specific genes. We hope that the obtained info could be useful to define, if possible, known drugs and treatments that could be used to specifically target these genes and that could have clinical relevance. |