ANALYSIS FOR CASCADING FAILURES WITH DNA REPAIR FUNCTION OF GENE NETWORK AND ITS APPLICATION

Gene networks research has grown steadily because of its potential to represent, characterize and model a wide range of systems and phenomena on the molecular level. Especially the studies on the cancer-related gene networks through complex interactions can help to provide better understanding of the formation and development of cancer. In this work, using the expressions data of normal and lung adenocarcinoma stage, mutual information networks of cancer-related genes are constructed first. Then a model for cascading failures with DNA repair function of weighted gene networks is built. Furthermore, comparisons of numerical experiments show that deleting nodes in the networks of adenocarcinoma experimental group is more likely to cause larger scales of cascading failure than the one of control group. In addition, we find that 13 genes of control group and 12 genes of experimental group are of very strong destructibility for the two networks, respectively. The failures of these genes can lead to the paralysis of the whole network. Therefore, we conclude that these genes might play important roles in keeping normal level or developing lung adenocarcinoma of organisms. The results may have certain significance for the interpretation of lung cancer development and provide beneficial inspirations to clarify lung cancer occurrence of biological mechanism.