Global gene expression profiling analysis reveals reduction of stemness after B-RAF inhibition in colorectal cancer cell lines

Cancer cell differentiation is an important field of discussion in the light of cancer stem cells. In a recent study by Herr et al. (2015) "B-RAF inhibitors induce epithelial differentiation in BRAF-mutant colorectal cancer cells" we described how inhibition of mutant BRAF in colorectal cancer cell lines induces cell re-differentiation that is correlated with the loss of tumor growth in vitro and in vivo. We used Illumina HumanHT-12 v4 Expression BeadChip to characterize the gain of differentiation of PLX4720-treated 3D cultures of HT29 and Colo-205 cells. Here, we describe the experimental design and statistical analysis that were performed on the data set leading to the above hypothesis. The data are publicly available at the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database under the accession number GSE50791.