Project description:Recently, multicellular spheroids were isolated from a well-established epithelial ovarian cancer cell line, OVCAR-3, and were propagated in vitro. These spheroid derived cells displayed numerous hallmarks of cancer stem cells, which are chemo and radioresistant cells thought to be a significant cause of cancer recurrence and resultant mortality. Gene set enrichment analysis of expression data from the OVCAR-3 cells and the spheroid-derived putative cancer stem cells identified several metabolic pathways enriched in differentially expressed genes. Before this, there had been little previous knowledge or investigation of systems-scale metabolic differences between cancer cells and cancer stem cells, and no knowledge of such differences in ovarian cancer stem cells. To determine if there were substantial metabolic changes corresponding with these transcriptional differences, we used two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry to measure the metabolite profiles of the two cell lines. These two cell lines exhibited significant metabolic differences in both intracellular and extracellular metabolite measurements. Principal components analysis, an unsupervised dimensional reduction technique, showed complete separation between the two cell types based on their metabolite profiles. Pathway analysis of intracellular metabolomics data revealed close overlap with metabolic pathways identified from gene expression data, with four out of six pathways found enriched in gene-level analysis also enriched in metabolite-level analysis. Some of those pathways contained multiple metabolites that were individually statistically significantly different between the two cell lines, with one of the most broadly and consistently different pathways, arginine and proline metabolism, suggesting an interesting hypothesis about cancerous and stem-like metabolic phenotypes in this pair of cell lines. Overall, we demonstrate for the first time that metabolism in an ovarian cancer stem cell line is distinct from that of more differentiated isogenic cancer cells, supporting the potential importance of metabolism in the differences between cancer cells and cancer stem cells.

Project description:Chavez2009 - a core regulatory network of OCT4 in human embryonic stem cells A core OCT4-regulated network has been identified as a test case, to analyase stem cell characteristics and cellular differentiation. This model is described in the article: In silico identification of a core regulatory network of OCT4 in human embryonic stem cells using an integrated approach. Chavez L, Bais AS, Vingron M, Lehrach H, Adjaye J, Herwig R BMC Genomics, 2009, 10:314 Abstract: BACKGROUND: The transcription factor OCT4 is highly expressed in pluripotent embryonic stem cells which are derived from the inner cell mass of mammalian blastocysts. Pluripotency and self renewal are controlled by a transcription regulatory network governed by the transcription factors OCT4, SOX2 and NANOG. Recent studies on reprogramming somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells highlight OCT4 as a key regulator of pluripotency. RESULTS: We have carried out an integrated analysis of high-throughput data (ChIP-on-chip and RNAi experiments along with promoter sequence analysis of putative target genes) and identified a core OCT4 regulatory network in human embryonic stem cells consisting of 33 target genes. Enrichment analysis with these target genes revealed that this integrative analysis increases the functional information content by factors of 1.3 - 4.7 compared to the individual studies. In order to identify potential regulatory co-factors of OCT4, we performed a de novo motif analysis. In addition to known validated OCT4 motifs we obtained binding sites similar to motifs recognized by further regulators of pluripotency and development; e.g. the heterodimer of the transcription factors C-MYC and MAX, a prerequisite for C-MYC transcriptional activity that leads to cell growth and proliferation. CONCLUSION: Our analysis shows how heterogeneous functional information can be integrated in order to reconstruct gene regulatory networks. As a test case we identified a core OCT4-regulated network that is important for the analysis of stem cell characteristics and cellular differentiation. Functional information is largely enriched using different experimental results. The de novo motif discovery identified well-known regulators closely connected to the OCT4 network as well as potential new regulators of pluripotency and differentiation. These results provide the basis for further targeted functional studies. This model is hosted on BioModels Database and identified by: MODEL1305010000 . To cite BioModels Database, please use: BioModels Database: An enhanced, curated and annotated resource for published quantitative kinetic models . To the extent possible under law, all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to this encoded model have been dedicated to the public domain worldwide. Please refer to CC0 Public Domain Dedication for more information.

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