Cancers constitute a severe threat to human health. Elucidating the association between the expression patterns of the paralogous genes and transcription factors (TF) and the progression of cancers by comprehensively investigating the expression patterns and co-expression networks will contribute to the in-depth understanding of the pathogenesis of cancers. Here, we identified the paralogous gene pairs and systematically analyzed the expression patterns of these paralogs and the known TFs to elucidate the associations with Tumor, Node, Metastasis (TNM) staging information across ten cancers. We found that the expression of ~60% paralogs was cancer-dependent, and more than 50% of the differentially expressed TFs pairs showed positive expression correlations. The down-regulation patterns of paralogs and TFs were closely associated with the M and N developmental stages of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC). Our results will help to understand the roles of paralogs and TFs in cancer progression and to screen prognostic biomarkers for early cancer diagnosis.

癌症对人类健康构成严重威胁。通过对表达模式和共表达网络的综合研究，阐明旁系同源基因和转录因子（TF）的表达模式与癌症进展之间的关联，将有助于深入了解癌症的发病机制。在这里，我们确定了旁系同源基因对，并系统地分析了这些旁系同源基因和已知 TF 的表达模式，以阐明与十种癌症的肿瘤、淋巴结、转移 (TNM) 分期信息的关联。我们发现~60% 旁系同源物的表达是癌症依赖性的，并且超过 50% 的差异表达 TFs 对显示出正表达相关性。旁系同源物和 TF 的下调模式与肺腺癌 (LUAD) 和肺鳞状细胞癌 (LUSC) 的M和N发育阶段。我们的结果将有助于了解旁系同源物和 TF 在癌症进展中的作用，并筛选用于早期癌症诊断的预后生物标志物。