Cell Reports (Jul 2018)

A Pan-Cancer Compendium of Genes Deregulated by Somatic Genomic Rearrangement across More Than 1,400 Cases

  • Yiqun Zhang,
  • Lixing Yang,
  • Melanie Kucherlapati,
  • Fengju Chen,
  • Angela Hadjipanayis,
  • Angeliki Pantazi,
  • Christopher A. Bristow,
  • Eunjung A. Lee,
  • Harshad S. Mahadeshwar,
  • Jiabin Tang,
  • Jianhua Zhang,
  • Sahil Seth,
  • Semin Lee,
  • Xiaojia Ren,
  • Xingzhi Song,
  • Huandong Sun,
  • Jonathan Seidman,
  • Lovelace J. Luquette,
  • Ruibin Xi,
  • Lynda Chin,
  • Alexei Protopopov,
  • Wei Li,
  • Peter J. Park,
  • Raju Kucherlapati,
  • Chad J. Creighton

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 24, no. 2
pp. 515 – 527

Abstract

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Summary: A systematic cataloging of genes affected by genomic rearrangement, using multiple patient cohorts and cancer types, can provide insight into cancer-relevant alterations outside of exomes. By integrative analysis of whole-genome sequencing (predominantly low pass) and gene expression data from 1,448 cancers involving 18 histopathological types in The Cancer Genome Atlas, we identified hundreds of genes for which the nearby presence (within 100 kb) of a somatic structural variant (SV) breakpoint is associated with altered expression. While genomic rearrangements are associated with widespread copy-number alteration (CNA) patterns, approximately 1,100 genes—including overexpressed cancer driver genes (e.g., TERT, ERBB2, CDK12, CDK4) and underexpressed tumor suppressors (e.g., TP53, RB1, PTEN, STK11)—show SV-associated deregulation independent of CNA. SVs associated with the disruption of topologically associated domains, enhancer hijacking, or fusion transcripts are implicated in gene upregulation. For cancer-relevant pathways, SVs considerably expand our understanding of how genes are affected beyond point mutation or CNA. : Zhang et al. analyzed over 1,400 cancers by high- or low-pass whole-genome sequencing, focusing on patterns of structural variation. They saw a widespread impact of somatic structural variants on gene expression patterns, independent of copy-number alterations, involving key oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Keywords: cancer, structural variation, genomic rearrangement, whole genome sequencing, pan-cancer, TCGA