Generalized Portrait of Cancer Metabolic Pathways Inferred from a List of Genes Overexpressed in Cancer

Table 2

KEGG metabolic pathways enriched in genes that are overexpressed in cancer.

Pathway	Number of genes in a pathway	Number of genes overexpressed in cancer	Pathway enrichment
Glycolysis/gluconeogenesis	62	10
Oxidative phosphorylation	135	10	0.00015
Pyruvate metabolism	40	5	0.00083
Metabolism of xenobiotics by cytochrome P450	70	6	0.0016
Fructose and mannose metabolism	34	4	0.0034
One carbon pool by folate	17	3	0.0041
TCA cycle (citrate cycle)	32	3	0.02
Glycerolipid metabolism	49	3	0.054
Steroid hormone biosynthesis	55	3	0.07
Pentose phosphate pathway	27	2	0.082
Purine metabolism/purine de novo biosynthesis	159	4	0.35
Pyrimidine metabolism/pyrimidine de novo biosynthesis	98	3	0.23
Cysteine and methionine metabolism	34	2	0.12
Aminoacyl tRNA biosynthesis	41	2	0.16
Fatty acid metabolism	43	2	0.17
N-Glycan biosynthesis	46	2	0.19
Phenylalanine/tyrosine/histidine metabolism	18/42/29	3	—
Enzymes introducing posttranslational modifications	?	6	—
Additional antioxidant systems	?	3	—

Pathway enrichment is estimated using the Fisher exact test (-, , -, ). is the total number of genes in the initial set (23,586 genes), is the number of proteins in a given pathway, is the total number of genes that are overexpressed in cancer (394 genes), and is the total number of genes in a given pathway that are overexpressed in cancer.