The Role of Primate-Specific Genes and Network Dynamics in Cancer Evolution

The atavistic evolutionary theory of cancer evolution highlights the role of ancient and unicell-originated genes, and comprehensive research demonstrated the evolutionary inference. Comparably, very few reports linked young genes with cancer development and maintenance. Here, we found that in cancer cell lines a higher proportion of core essential genes was present among primate-specific genes (PSG) than early metazoan-originated genes (Wilcoxon rank-sum test, p-value = 4.67e-12) and mammal-originated genes (Wilcoxon rank-sum test, p-value = 1.22e-16). Additionally, we found that the loss of many co-expression gene pairs in pan-cancer leads to their network becoming looser compared with normal tissue. However, PSGs particularly those being essential, exhibit a dynamic increase in co-expression, explaining their enhanced role in maintaining cancers. Furthermore, clustering of the gene co-expressions brings a cancer-exclusive module, which contains a large number of PSG connections. We also demonstrate the divergence between essential genes in healthy individuals and those in cancer cells. Our findings complement the atavistic theory in elucidating the evolutionary process of cancer.