BMC Genomics BioMed Central Research article Open Access Meta-analysis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma microarray data explores mechanism of EBV-regulated neoplastic transformation Xia Chen†1,2, Shuang Liang†1, WenLing Zheng1,3, ZhiJun Liao1, Tao Shang1 and WenLi Ma*1 Address: 1Institute of Genetic Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, PR China, 2Xiangya Pingkuang associated hospital, Pingxiang, Jiangxi, PR China and 3Southern Genomics Research Center, Guangzhou, Guangdong, PR China Email: Xia Chen -
[email protected]; Shuang Liang -
[email protected]; WenLing Zheng -
[email protected]; ZhiJun Liao -
[email protected]; Tao Shang -
[email protected]; WenLi Ma* -
[email protected] * Corresponding author †Equal contributors Published: 7 July 2008 Received: 16 February 2008 Accepted: 7 July 2008 BMC Genomics 2008, 9:322 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-9-322 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/9/322 © 2008 Chen et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) presumably plays an important role in the pathogenesis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), but the molecular mechanism of EBV-dependent neoplastic transformation is not well understood. The combination of bioinformatics with evidences from biological experiments paved a new way to gain more insights into the molecular mechanism of cancer. Results: We profiled gene expression using a meta-analysis approach. Two sets of meta-genes were obtained. Meta-A genes were identified by finding those commonly activated/deactivated upon EBV infection/reactivation.