Mutually exclusive teams-like patterns of gene regulation characterize phenotypic heterogeneity along the noradrenergic-mesenchymal axis in neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma is the most frequent extracranial pediatric tumor and leads to 15% of all cancer-related deaths in children. Tumor relapse and therapy resistance in neuroblastoma are driven by phenotypic plasticity and heterogeneity between noradrenergic (NOR) and mesenchymal (MES) cell states. Despite the importance of this phenotypic plasticity, however, the dynamics and molecular patterns associated with these bidirectional cell-state transitions remain relatively poorly understood. Here, we analyze multiple RNA-seq datasets at both bulk and single-cell resolution, to understand the association between NOR- and MES-specific factors. We observed that NOR-specific and MES-specific expression patterns are largely mutually exclusive, exhibiting a "teams-like" behavior among the genes involved, reminiscent of our earlier observations in lung cancer and melanoma. This antagonism was noticed also in the association of NOR and MES phenotypes with metabolic reprogramming and with immunotherapy targets PD-L1 and GD2, and in experimental perturbations driving the NOR-MES and/or MES-NOR transition. Further, this "teams-like" patterns was seen only among the NOR- and MES-specific genes, but not in housekeeping genes, possibly highlighting a hallmark of network topology enabling cancer cell plasticity.