Gender-specific Thyroid Cancer-related Genes And Co-expression Network Analysis

Thyroid cancer is the most common malignant tumor of the endocrine organs.Among systemic tumors,its incidence is about 1%.There is a huge difference in its incidence between men and women.The incidence of women is about 3% of that of men.4 times.Finding the differentially expressed genes in thyroid cancer between men and women at the molecular level and exploring the significance of the biological process is of positive significance for understanding the pathogenesis of thyroid cancer and the reasons for gender differences,as well as for the prevention,diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer in the future.In this study,we used the RNA-seq gene expression data and clinical phenotype data of thyroid cancer(THCA)from the TCGA database downloaded from the Ucsc?xena platform to obtain 20530 gene data and 580 clinical data of 572 thyroid cancer patient samples.After the data was matched and the cancer metastasis type samples were eliminated,136 male cancer tissue samples,17 paracancerous tissue samples,369 female cancer tissue samples,and 42 female paracancerous tissue samples were obtained.Use R language programming to process data,and use bioinformatics packages limma package,edge R package and DESeq2 package to screen for differentially expressed genes in RNA-Seq data.First,analyze the differential expression of the cancer gene tissue data according to the male and female to obtain the gender differentially expressed thyroid cancer genes.Secondly,perform the differential analysis of the thyroid cancer tissue gene and the adjacent tissue gene data in the male to obtain the male thyroid cancer differentially expressed genes.The female sample data is processed in the same way to obtain the differentially expressed genes of female thyroid cancer.Next,use the difference set between male differentially expressed genes and female differentially expressed genes and the intersection of gender differentially expressed genes as male-specific thyroid cancer differentially expressed genes,and use the same difference between female differentially expressed genes and male differentially expressed genes and gender differences The intersection of genes,as a differentially expressed gene in female-specific thyroid cancer.Finally,the intersection of male and female specific expression genes obtained by the three methods is taken as male and female specific differentially expressed genes,including male-specific differentially expressed genes ALG10,DNASE2 B and TMEM181,and female-specific differentially expressed genes AGAP11,AK5,ALG13,CASQ2,DZIP1 L,IL13RA2,KCTD21,NR2E3,PLCXD1,PRKY,ZNF182,etc.19,and carry out biological annotations for these genes.To further explore the sex-differentially expressed thyroid cancer-related genes we screened,we performed WGCNA analysis on male and female differential genes,and explored the relationship between them and thyroid cancer by searching for the modules to which these differential genes belong.By constructing a co-expression network,we obtained 16 gene modules in male differentially expressed genes,of which two modules contain male-specific differentially expressed genes(turquoise module and yellow module).There are 19 gene modules in female differentially expressed genes,nine of which contain female-specifically expressed genes,and three modules(turquoise module,purple module and blue module)contain three or more female-specific differentially expressed genes,and among them One of the hub genes in the purple module is the female-specific differentially expressed gene(ZNF182gene)we have screened,further confirming that this gene may be a differentially expressed gene for female-specific thyroid cancer.We performed KEGG pathway analysis on two male gene modules and three female gene modules,and looked for these modules may be related to certain signaling pathways that lead to the occurrence of thyroid cancer.We found that the male turquoise module is related to the Wnt signaling pathway,the female turquoise module is related to the PI3K/Ak T signaling pathway,the female purple module is related to the p53 signaling pathway,and the female blue module is related to the MAPK signaling pathway.Signal pathways related to the occurrence of thyroid cancer.