Estimating the number of available states for normal and tumor tissues in gene expression space

Gene expression data for a set of 12 localizations from The Cancer Genome Atlas are processed in order to evaluate an entropy-like magnitude allowing the characterization of tumors and comparison with the corresponding normal tissues. The comparison indicates that the number of available states in gene expression space is much greater for tumors than for normal tissues and points out to a scaling relation between the fraction of available states and the overlapping between the tumor and normal sample clouds.