Comparison of genes upregulated in metastasis with three C. elegans cell migrations

Cell migration is an important process occurring during normal animal development but also in the early stages of metastatic cancer when cells invasively migrate out of the primary tumor. It is therefore likely that some of the same genes function in both migrations. Although transcriptional profiling has identified many genes differentially expressed between metastases and primary tumors, we do not understand the function of most of these genes in either normal or disease states. Our goal has been to identify conserved genes used in migration of mammalian metastasis and normal C. elegans development to further characterize their function in both systems. From two published transcriptional profile datasets, we selected genes that were upregulated in metastases compared to primary tumors, and then identified the C. elegans orthologs of those genes to generate a list of 107 genes.