Alcohol-Induced Differential Variable Genes

It is well known that excessive drinking could result in human diseases (e.g., liver disease and cardiovascular disease). To investigate the underlying mechanisms of the effects of alcohol consumption, dental pulp stem cells have been used due to their self-renewal capability, multi-lineage differentiation, and clonogenic efficiency. Researchers usually focus on detecting genes having different mean expression levels between different conditions. However, the variance of gene expression might also provide useful information. In this study, we applied the Brown. Forsythe (BF) test for equal variance based on a human dental pulp stem cells dataset to explore the role of alcohol on the variation of gene expression. We identified two differential variable (DV) gene probes, 213597_s_at near gene CTDSPL (FDR-adjusted p-value = 1.50x10-5) and 213993_at near gene SPON1 (FDR-adjusted p-value=0.042). To best of our knowledge, no studies have found yet the associations of CTDSPL and/or SPON1 to alcohol consumption. GeneMANIA showed that these two genes are related to 20 genes. Web based gene set analysis toolkit (WebGestalt) showed that these 22 genes are enriched in 4 alcohol-related KEGG pathways: adherens junction, TGF-beta signaling pathway, signaling pathways regulating pluripotency of stem cells, and Hippo signaling pathway.