Differentially Variable Genes of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) represents more than 90% of all oral cancers. The etiology of the disease has been linked to genetics. To determine OSCC-associated genes, researchers usually test if the mean expression level of a gene among OSCC patients is different from that among non-OSCC patients. Recently, researchers found that genes having different variances between two biological states are also relevant to the disease of interest. To the best of our knowledge, no differential variability analysis has been conducted to investigate the genetic risk factors of OSCC yet. In this article, we identified genes differentially variable between the OSCC cases and controls by using the Brown-Forsythe test (BF test) based on two public available gene expression data sets (GSE30784 and GSE6791) from the Gene Expression Omnibus. By using the discovery set, we identified 2,904 DV gene probes, among which 456 DV probes were replicated by the validation set. Our results showed that differential variable genes could provide additional information about the mechanisms of OSCC.