A Systems Biology View of the Spliceosome Component Phf5a in Relation to Estrogen and Cancer

Cancer is a broad term for a wide spectrum of diseases and which involves the alteration in expression levels of several hundreds of genes. As such, the study of the disease from a systems biology point of view becomes rational, as the properties of a system as a whole may be very different from the properties of its individual components. In this article, a systems biology view of the rat PHD finger protein 5A (Phf5a) gene was attempted; a gene previously identified as aberrantly expressed in estrogen dependent endometrial adenocarcinoma tumors from both rat and human. To derive a systems biology view, in this study, a weighted gene network was inferred from a list of genes having correlated expression profiles to Phf5a as nodes, and common transcription factors and microRNAs regulating these genes together with annotation about biological process ontology term(s) and pathway(s) as edge weights. The results also link Phf5a to the Myc/Rb/E2F pathway, one of the central pathways associated with cancer.