Systematic Normalization with Multiple Housekeeping Genes for the Discovery of Genetic Dependencies in Cancer

Despite the heterogeneity of data, we observed that multiple gene normalization revealed more consistent correlations between pairs of genes, compared to using single gene expressions. We also noted that multiple gene normalization using ten genes outperformed normalization using three randomly selected genes. Since this study uses gene expression data from cancer tissues and begins to address the reproducibility of correlation between two genes, it complements other efforts to identify gene pairs that co-express in cancer cell lines. In the future, we plan to define consistent genetic correlations by using gene expression data derived from different types of cancer and multiple gene normalization.