A Novel Approach for Detection of Genes Related to Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) has the highest incidence among all the oral neoplasms, thus widely affects people’s life. Genetics has an important effect on the OSCC’s etiopathogenesis. However, OSCC’s molecular mechanism has not been completed investigated yet. We proposed a novel method to detect genes that are associated to OSCC, where mean difference and variance difference were compared between cases and controls. This method can discover knowledge from gene data by processing multi-format information and has managed to identify disease-associated genes for many complex human diseases, like melanoma, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), lung adenocarcinoma, and serous ovarian cancer. Based on Gene Expression Omnibus, two OSCC datasets were derived and gene probes were then identified, typed as differentially variable (DV) and differentially expressed (DE), with number 456 and 2,375, respectively. Those probes can be further discriminated as DE-only, DV-only and then DE-and-DV probes, with number 2,193, 274 and 182, respectively. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways were adopted to distinctly enrich genes that relevant to these three kinds of specific probes, as per the DAVID functional analysis, implying they have diverse works in OSCC. In the future, our novel method also could be applied to investigate other complex human diseases’ genetic risk factors.