SYSTEM LEVEL ORGANISATION IN OVARIAN CANCER

Abstract

Ovarian cancer (OC) is one of the most fatal gynecological malignancy, it is also the fifth leading cause of all cancer-related deaths in women. Carcinoma begins in the ovary and undergoes progressive dedifferentiation to the poorly differentiated tumor and spreads to pelvic and abdominal cavities. Identification of diagnostic biomarkers and development of early detection techniques for ovarian cancer largely depends on upon an understanding of the complex functionality and regulation of genes involved in the disease. Organization of genes in ovarian cancer is hierarchically organized and scale free, there is a topological self-organization of each module and sub-modules at each level which obeys power law. This shows that nodes in the network are highly connected and are called as hubs. These hubs play an important role in the network. These modules show that they are functionally and physically interlinked. The presence of modularity in the modules and sub-modules shows that these are hierarchically arranged, for isolated modularity is zero. By using systems biology we approach we are able to analyze a large number of genes which are associated with the disease. Which will beneficial to therapeutics and clinical research.