Analysis of Transcriptomic Data Generated from Drug-Treated Cancer Cell Line.

Resistance to chemotherapy is one major obstacle in current cancer treatment. Therefore, understanding the molecular basis of the acquisition of resistance is vital for the design and development of appropriate cancer therapy. Importantly, acquisition of resistance is not a single-step process, and the molecular signature of cells dynamically changes during this process. With the advent of next-generation omic technologies, today one can precisely map the molecular alterations not only in a population of tumor cells but also at the single-cell level as they attain chemo-resistance. In this chapter, we describe a detailed transcriptomic pipeline following next-generation sequencing for mapping alteration in expression during the process of attainment of resistance. We provide comprehensive information on the process to (1) track the differential expression of transcripts, (2) understand the gene ontology functions, (3) filter out candidate key genes, (4) identify the pathways regulated by them, and (5) generate a map of their probable interactions. We assume that our analytical method will be useful for research in this direction.