Analysis of Gene Expression Differences between Different Pancreatic Cells

Abstract

The pancreas is a complex glandular organ in the abdominal cavity of humans. Pancreatic tissues contain different function regions that participate in different biological processes. Moreover, pancreatic cells can be clustered into different types according to their location regions. Cells in different types are involved in different biological functions as either endocrine or digestive. In this study, we investigated the gene expression of pancreatic cells in six types, tried to identify differentially expressed genes among different cell types, and obtained pancreatic cell biomarkers. In detail, the Monte Carlo feature selection (MCFS) method was performed on the dataset consisting of the gene expression of 2282 pancreatic cells. The resulting feature list was further used in the incremental feature selection method, with the help of a support vector machine to extract important differentially expressed genes. In addition, on the basis of the 776 informative features yielded by the MCFS method, we set up 12 classification rules via Johnson Reducer algorithm and Repeated Incremental Pruning to Produce Error Reduction algorithm, which can assign cells into six types. We did the enrichment analysis on obtained differentially expressed genes and extensively analyzed the top 10 differentially expressed genes and rules via literature reviewing, indicating that the results of this study are quite reliable.