This article, whose main author is David Cordero, published in BMC journal, shows how the dysregulation of transcriptional programs leads to cell malfunctioning and can have an impact on cancer development. The study aims to characterize global differences between transcriptional regulatory programs of normal and tumor colon cells. The results show that the tumor network exhibits a massive loss of transcriptional regulation, with a reduction of 81% of their interactions. Moreover, gene silencing was not a main determinant of this loss of regulatory activity, since the average gene expression was essentially conserved. Also, a set of 91 transcription factors, which widely increase their activity in the tumor network, were proposed. These genes revealed a tumor-specific emergent transcriptional regulatory program with significant functional enrichment related to colorectal cancer pathway.
These findings will allow a better understanding of the transcriptional regulatory programs altered in colon cancer and could be an invaluable methodology to identify potential hubs with a relevant role in the field of cancer diagnosis, prognosis and therapy.