Human Gene Set: BENPORATH_ES_1


Standard name BENPORATH_ES_1
Systematic name M1871
Brief description Set 'ES exp1': genes overexpressed in human embryonic stem cells according to 5 or more out of 20 profiling studies.
Full description or abstract Cancer cells possess traits reminiscent of those ascribed to normal stem cells. It is unclear, however, whether these phenotypic similarities reflect the activity of common molecular pathways. Here, we analyze the enrichment patterns of gene sets associated with embryonic stem (ES) cell identity in the expression profiles of various human tumor types. We find that histologically poorly differentiated tumors show preferential overexpression of genes normally enriched in ES cells, combined with preferential repression of Polycomb-regulated genes. Moreover, activation targets of Nanog, Oct4, Sox2 and c-Myc are more frequently overexpressed in poorly differentiated tumors than in well-differentiated tumors. In breast cancers, this ES-like signature is associated with high-grade estrogen receptor (ER)-negative tumors, often of the basal-like subtype, and with poor clinical outcome. The ES signature is also present in poorly differentiated glioblastomas and bladder carcinomas. We identify a subset of ES cell-associated transcription regulators that are highly expressed in poorly differentiated tumors. Our results reveal a previously unknown link between genes associated with ES cell identity and the histopathological traits of tumors and support the possibility that these genes contribute to stem cell-like phenotypes shown by many tumors.
Collection C2: Curated
      CGP: Chemical and Genetic Perturbations
Source publication Pubmed 18443585   Authors: Ben-Porath I,Thomson MW,Carey VJ,Ge R,Bell GW,Regev A,Weinberg RA
Exact source Table 1S: ES exp1
Related gene sets (show 15 additional gene sets from the source publication)

(show 403 gene sets from any of these authors)
External links
Filtered by similarity ?
Source species Homo sapiens
Contributed by Jessica Robertson (MSigDB Team)
Source platform or
identifier namespace		 Human_NCBI_Gene_ID
Dataset references  
Download gene set format: grp | gmt | xml | json | TSV metadata
Compute overlaps ? (show collections to investigate for overlap with this gene set)
Compendia expression profiles ? NG-CHM interactive heatmaps
(Please note that clustering takes a few seconds)
GTEx compendium
Human tissue compendium (Novartis)
Global Cancer Map (Broad Institute)
NCI-60 cell lines (National Cancer Institute)

Legacy heatmaps (PNG)
GTEx compendium
Human tissue compendium (Novartis)
Global Cancer Map (Broad Institute)
NCI-60 cell lines (National Cancer Institute)
Advanced query Further investigate these 379 genes
Gene families ? Categorize these 379 genes by gene family
Show members (show 379 source identifiers mapped to 379 genes)
Version history 3.0: First introduced

See MSigDB license terms here. Please note that certain gene sets have special access terms.