The study of metabolic pathways in tumors based on the transcriptome

DNA microarray technology revolutionized gene-expression analysis in molecular biology to observe patterns of gene expression in genomic scale. We review the biological aspects of genome-wide gene-expression activity in tumors specially focusing on the analysis of enzyme coding genes. First, the methods for analyzing gene-expression data for the study of metabolome in silico are discussed showing SV40T antigen expressing liver tumor data as an example. Next, an application for tumor metabolome analysis utilizing a reference set of gene-expression profiles is shown.