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Identification of introns harboring functional sequence elements through positional conservation.

ABSTRACT: Many human introns carry out a function, in the sense that they are critical to maintain normal cellular activity. Their identification is fundamental to understanding cellular processes and disease. However, being noncoding elements, such functional introns are poorly predicted based on traditional approaches of sequence and structure conservation. Here, we generated a dataset of human functional introns that carry out different types of functions. We showed that functional introns share common characteristics, such as higher positional conservation along the coding sequence and reduced loss rates, regardless of their specific function. A unique property of the data is that if an intron is unknown to be functional, it still does not mean that it is indeed non-functional. We developed a probabilistic framework that explicitly accounts for this unique property, and predicts which specific human introns are functional. We show that we successfully predict function even when the algorithm is trained on introns with a different type of function. This ability has many implications in studying regulatory networks, gene regulation, the effect of mutations outside exons on human disease, and on our general understanding of intron evolution and their functional exaptation in mammals.

SUBMITTER: Chorev M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5482813 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Identification of introns harboring functional sequence elements through positional conservation.

Chorev Michal M Joseph Bekker Alan A Goldberger Jacob J Carmel Liran L

Scientific reports 20170623 1

Many human introns carry out a function, in the sense that they are critical to maintain normal cellular activity. Their identification is fundamental to understanding cellular processes and disease. However, being noncoding elements, such functional introns are poorly predicted based on traditional approaches of sequence and structure conservation. Here, we generated a dataset of human functional introns that carry out different types of functions. We showed that functional introns share common ...[more]

PMID: 28646210

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Project description:Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the predominant lung cancer subtype. To date, 15 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been reproducibly associated with LUAD susceptibility. However, as most SNPs identified in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are not located in the coding regions of genes and are co-inherited with hundreds of SNPs in linkage disequilibrium (LD), mechanistic links to disease outcomes remain largely unexplored. We hypothesized that some SNPs increase LUAD risk by affecting enhancers of gene transcription in alveolar epithelial cells (AECs), the purported cells of origin for LUAD. Forty-six LUAD risk-associated SNPs mapped to putative AEC enhancers, and 11 of these were located in FAIRE peaks. Of those, seven were predicted to form transcription factor binding motifs. For four of these, ChIPseq data confirmed the binding of the predicted transcription factors. We chose rs452384, rs6942067 and rs11364096 for functional validation. The reference (risk) allele for rs452384 forms an NKX2-1 binding site that is disrupted by the alternate allele, elicited a 42% increase in activity in H1648 LUAD cells relative to the alternative allele (P = 6.7 x 10-3), and was associated with elevated TERT levels in esophageal tissue (P = 6 x 10-8). The reference (risk) allele for rs6942067 forms an EP300 binding site disrupted by the alternate allele, elicits a 94% increase in enhancer activity relative to the alternative allele in H1648 LUAD cells (P = 2.7 x 10-2), and was associated with higher expression of potential oncogene DCBLD1 in blood (P = 5.2 x 10-16). Lastly, the alternate (risk) allele for rs11364096 disrupts binding sites for FOXA1, HDAC2 and SP1, elicits a 32% decrease in enhancer activity in A549 LUAD cells relative to the reference allele (P = 5.7 x 10-3), and LUAD data from The Cancer Genome Atlas indicates that this SNP is associated with altered expression in LUAD of four genes on other chromosomes. Our analyses provide possible mechanisms for the genetic susceptibility to LUAD, with the identification of three strong functional SNP candidates that appear to affect AEC enhancers. Further investigation of these enhancers and their target genes may ultimately yield more effective and personalized strategies for LUAD risk assessment, prevention and treatment.

Dataset Information

Identification of introns harboring functional sequence elements through positional conservation.

Publications

Identification of introns harboring functional sequence elements through positional conservation.

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