Pan-organ transcriptome variation across 21 cancer types

Abstract It is widely accepted that some messenger RNAs are evolutionarily conserved across species, both in sequence and tissue-expression specificity. To date, however, little effort has been made to exploit the transcriptome divergence between cancer and adjacent normal tissue at the pan-organ level. In this work, a transcriptome sequencing dataset from 675 normal-tumor pairs, representing 21 solid organs in The Cancer Genome Atlas, is used to evaluate expression evolution. The results show that in most cancer types, gene expression divergence