Differential network analysis and protein-protein interaction study reveals active protein modules in glucocorticoid resistance for infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia

BACKGROUND: Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common type of cancer diagnosed in children and Glucocorticoids (GCs) form an essential component of the standard chemotherapy in most treatment regimens. The category of infant ALL patients carrying a translocation involving the mixed lineage leukemia (MLL) gene (gene KMT2A) is characterized by resistance to GCs and poor clinical outcome. Although some studies examined GC-resistance in infant ALL patients, the understanding of this phenomenon remains limited and impede the efforts to improve prognosis. METHODS: This study integrates differential co-expression (DC) and protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks to find active protein modules associated with GC-resistance in MLL-rearranged infant ALL patients. A network was constructed by linking differentially co-expressed gene pairs between GC-resistance and GC-sensitive samples and later integrated with PPI networks by keeping the links that are also present in the PPI network. The resulting network was decomposed into two sub-networks, specific to each phenotype. Finally, both sub-networks were clustered into modules using weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) and further analyzed with functional enrichment analysis. RESULTS: Through the integration of DC analysis and PPI network, four protein modules were found active under the GC-resistance phenotype but not under the GC-sensitive. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that these modules are related to proteasome, electron transport chain, tRNA-aminoacyl biosynthesis, and peroxisome signaling pathways. These findings are in accordance with previous findings related to GC-resistance in other hematological malignancies such as pediatric ALL. CONCLUSIONS: Differential co-expression analysis is a promising approach to incorporate the dynamic context of gene expression profiles into the well-documented protein interaction networks. The approach allows the detection of relevant protein modules that are highly enriched with DC gene pairs. Functional enrichment analysis of detected protein modules generates new biological hypotheses and may help in explaining the GC-resistance in MLL-rearranged infant ALL patients. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s10020-019-0106-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.