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Replication stress links structural and numerical cancer chromosomal instability.

ABSTRACT: Cancer chromosomal instability (CIN) results in an increased rate of change of chromosome number and structure and generates intratumour heterogeneity. CIN is observed in most solid tumours and is associated with both poor prognosis and drug resistance. Understanding a mechanistic basis for CIN is therefore paramount. Here we find evidence for impaired replication fork progression and increased DNA replication stress in CIN(+) colorectal cancer (CRC) cells relative to CIN(-) CRC cells, with structural chromosome abnormalities precipitating chromosome missegregation in mitosis. We identify three new CIN-suppressor genes (PIGN (also known as MCD4), MEX3C (RKHD2) and ZNF516 (KIAA0222)) encoded on chromosome 18q that are subject to frequent copy number loss in CIN(+) CRC. Chromosome 18q loss was temporally associated with aneuploidy onset at the adenoma-carcinoma transition. CIN-suppressor gene silencing leads to DNA replication stress, structural chromosome abnormalities and chromosome missegregation. Supplementing cells with nucleosides, to alleviate replication-associated damage, reduces the frequency of chromosome segregation errors after CIN-suppressor gene silencing, and attenuates segregation errors and DNA damage in CIN(+) cells. These data implicate a central role for replication stress in the generation of structural and numerical CIN, which may inform new therapeutic approaches to limit intratumour heterogeneity.

SUBMITTER: Burrell RA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4636055 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Replication stress links structural and numerical cancer chromosomal instability.

Burrell Rebecca A RA McClelland Sarah E SE Endesfelder David D Groth Petra P Weller Marie-Christine MC Shaikh Nadeem N Domingo Enric E Kanu Nnennaya N Dewhurst Sally M SM Gronroos Eva E Chew Su Kit SK Rowan Andrew J AJ Schenk Arne A Sheffer Michal M Howell Michael M Kschischo Maik M Behrens Axel A Helleday Thomas T Bartek Jiri J Tomlinson Ian P IP Swanton Charles C

Nature 20130201 7438

Cancer chromosomal instability (CIN) results in an increased rate of change of chromosome number and structure and generates intratumour heterogeneity. CIN is observed in most solid tumours and is associated with both poor prognosis and drug resistance. Understanding a mechanistic basis for CIN is therefore paramount. Here we find evidence for impaired replication fork progression and increased DNA replication stress in CIN(+) colorectal cancer (CRC) cells relative to CIN(-) CRC cells, with stru ...[more]

PMID: 23446422

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Project description:BackgroundDespite our substantial understanding of molecular mechanisms and gene mutations involved in cancer, the technical approaches for diagnosis and prognosis of cancer are limited. In routine clinical diagnosis of cancer, the procedure is very basic: nuclear morphology is used as a common assessment of the degree of malignancy, and hence acts as a prognostic and predictive indicator of the disease. Furthermore, though the atypical nuclear morphology of cancer cells is believed to be a consequence of oncogenic signaling, the molecular basis remains unclear. Another common characteristic of human cancer is aneuploidy, but the causes and its role in carcinogenesis are not well established.MethodsWe investigated the expression of the nuclear envelope proteins lamin A/C in ovarian cancer by immunohistochemistry and studied the consequence of lamin A/C suppression using siRNA in primary human ovarian surface epithelial cells in culture. We used immunofluorescence microscopy to analyze nuclear morphology, flow cytometry to analyze cellular DNA content, and fluorescence in situ hybridization to examine cell ploidy of the lamin A/C-suppressed cells.ResultsWe found that nuclear lamina proteins lamin A/C are often absent (47%) in ovarian cancer cells and tissues. Even in lamin A/C-positive ovarian cancer, the expression is heterogeneous within the population of tumor cells. In most cancer cell lines, a significant fraction of the lamin A/C-negative population was observed to intermix with the lamin A/C-positive cells. Down regulation of lamin A/C in non-cancerous primary ovarian surface epithelial cells led to morphological deformation and development of aneuploidy. The aneuploid cells became growth retarded due to a p53-dependent induction of the cell cycle inhibitor p21.ConclusionsWe conclude that the loss of nuclear envelope structural proteins, such as lamin A/C, may underlie two of the hallmarks of cancer--aberrations in nuclear morphology and aneuploidy.

Project description:Cancer cells frequently undergo chromosome missegregation events during mitosis, whereby the copies of a given chromosome are not distributed evenly among the two daughter cells, thus creating cells with heterogeneous karyotypes. A stochastic model tracing cellular karyotypes derived from clonal populations over hundreds of generations was recently developed and experimentally validated, and it was capable of predicting favorable karyotypes frequently observed in cancer. Here, we construct and study a Markov chain that precisely describes karyotypic evolution during clonally expanding cancer cell populations. The Markov chain allows us to directly predict the distribution of karyotypes and the expected size of the tumor after many cell divisions without resorting to computationally expensive simulations. We determine the limiting karyotype distribution of an evolving tumor population, and quantify its dependency on several key parameters including the initial karyotype of the founder cell, the rate of whole chromosome missegregation, and chromosome-specific cell viability. Using this model, we confirm the existence of an optimal rate of chromosome missegregation probabilities that maximizes karyotypic heterogeneity, while minimizing the occurrence of nullisomy. Interestingly, karyotypic heterogeneity is significantly more dependent on chromosome missegregation probabilities rather than the number of cell divisions, so that maximal heterogeneity can be reached rapidly (within a few hundred generations of cell division) at chromosome missegregation rates commonly observed in cancer cell lines. Conversely, at low missegregation rates, heterogeneity is constrained even after thousands of cell division events. This leads us to conclude that chromosome copy number heterogeneity is primarily constrained by chromosome missegregation rates and the risk for nullisomy and less so by the age of the tumor. This model enables direct integration of karyotype information into existing models of tumor evolution based on somatic mutations.

Project description:Aberrant cell proliferation, a hallmark of most cancers, requires the escape from intrinsic antitumour barriers. Primary among these is the DNA damage response (DDR). In both cell culture-models and in early stages of tumorigenesis in vivo, activated oncogenes induce DNA replication stress and DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), leading to DDR activation and p53-dependent apoptosis and/or senescence. The means by which tumour initiating cells, also termed cancer stem cells (CSCs), circumvent this oncosuppressive response is unknown. Here we demonstrate that the ZEB1 transcription factor provides breast CSCs with the ability to withstand an aberrant mitogenic activity. Its forced expression in human mammary epithelial cells is sufficient to alleviate DNA replicative stress and to decrease the production of reactive oxygen species, an important contributor to DDR and oncogene-induced senescence. Consistently, human breast cancer cells with endogenous ZEB1 expression show two characteristic features: low levels of DSBs and DDR markers, reflecting mitigation of the DNA replication stress, and a low p53 mutation frequency, reflecting a weak selective pressure for inactivation. Using high-throughput sequencing analysis of controlled cellular models, we further demonstrate that ZEB1 delays the onset of structural chromosomal instability (CIN), a known consequence of replicative stress and prevents the emergence of chromosome 8p deletions and 8q amplifications, two prevalent abnormalities in high grade breast cancers. Supporting these findings, ZEB1 expression discriminates human breast tumours by their copy number alterations (CNAs) and chromosome 8 aberrations. We propose that the tumorigenic potential of CSCs relies upon their unique capacity to tolerate oncogenic stimuli through the alleviation of DNA replication stress. Immortalized human mammary epithelial cells were infected with retrovirus expressing H-RASV12 with or without a retrovirus expressing ZEB1.

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Replication stress links structural and numerical cancer chromosomal instability.

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Replication stress links structural and numerical cancer chromosomal instability.

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