Blog Post Image: Can thermodynamics help us better understand human cancers?

‘Surprisal analysis’ provides a method to characterize how cellular energy is distributed in cancer cells to express critical genes. Image: The thermodynamic lung cancer-specific gene (mRNA and miRNA) signature. This figure illustrates that genes that up-regulated in the lung cancer state are down regulated in normal controls, and genes that are highly up-regulated in the normal controls are down-regulated in the lung cancer state. There is a clear, correlated gene-expression behavior present that not only characterizes the lung cancer state but can also be used to distinguish cancer patients from non-cancer patients. Image credit: PNAS/Sohila Zadran, Raphael Levine, Francoise Remacle (Click image to enlarge)