Bioinformatic screening of key genes controlling the development and progression of lung cancer

Lung cancer is the most common cancer in the world. The gene expression profiling of lung cancer has been extensively investigated. However, only a few studies have identified the possible pathways and significant genes related to lung cancer. The aim of this study is to explore the large number of lung cancer-related microarray datasets and identify the crucial genes that can benefit the understanding of the progression and development of this disease. To identify the genes that effected lung cancer at the mRNA level, gene set enrichment analysis was used to analyze six selected gene expression datasets. Among the six gene expression datasets, 3 up-regulated and 26 down-regulated pathways were found by gene set enrichment analysis. We found 11 significant genes with P < 0.05 from the results of tight junction meta-analysis of the six data sets. The tight junction pathway plays an important role in the study of the occurrence and development of lung cancer. Significant genes within the pathways will be further discussed in future studies.