ABSTRACT: This study provides simulated genome sequences, ground truth variant profiles, and whole-exome sequencing reads for artificial tumour bulk samples, as well as for individual subclones.
Project description:Type I interferons (IFNs) play a central role in innate immunity against virus infection, but also in the antitumour response. In tumour biology, an important mechanism of action apart from the more indirect immune-modulatory and anti-angiogenic effects of IFNs, is their direct impact on cell proliferation. Particularly for cancers arising in the context of chronic inflammation, constant exposure of cells to IFNs may constitute a strong selective pressure during tumour evolution. Expansion of tumour subclones or -populations that developed resistance to the antiproliferative effects of IFN might constitute an important contribution to immunoediting of the tumour leading to more aggressive and metastasising disease. Experimental evidence for this development of IFN-insensitivity has been scarce and its molecular mechanism is unclear. In this study we demonstrate that prolonged (six weeks) exposure of cells to IFN-β in vitro reduces their sensitivity to its antiproliferative effects, and that this phenotype was stable for up to four weeks. Furthermore, we observed substantial differences in cellular sensitivity to growth inhibition by IFN-β in a panel of ten different liver cancer cell lines of varying malignity. IFN-resistance was most prominent in a pair of highly dedifferentiated cell lines, and least in cells from well-differentiated tumours, fostering the hypothesis of IFN-driven immunoediting in advanced cancers. In both settings, long-term IFN selection in vitro as well as in dedifferentiated tumour cell lines, we found IFNAR expression to be substantially reduced, suggesting the receptor complex, in particular IFNAR2, to be a sensitive target amenable to immunoediting. Beyond new insights into possible molecular processes in tumour evolution, these findings might prove valuable for the development of biomarkers allowing to stratify tumours for their sensitivity to IFN treatment in the context of patient tailored therapies.
Project description:Purpose: Chemotherapy is pivotal in the multimodal treatment of pancreatic cancer patients. In recent years, technical advances have developed experimental methods that unveiled a high degree of inter- and intratumoral heterogeneity in pancreatic cancer. We hypothesized that intratumoral heterogeneity (ITH) impacts response to gemcitabine treatment and demands specific targeting of resistant subclones. Experimental Design: We addressed the effect of ITH on response to gemcitabine treatment using single cell-derived cell lines (SCDCL) from the classical-like cell line BxPC3 and the basal-like cell line Panc-1 which were analyzed by mRNA-seq and mass spectrometry. Results: Individual SCDCLs of the parental tumor cell populations of BxPC3 and Panc-1 showed considerable heterogeneity in response to gemcitabine. Unsupervised principal component analysis (PCA) including the 1,000 most variably expressed genes showed a clustering of the SCDCLs according to their respective sensitivity to gemcitabine treatment for BxPC3, while this clustering was less clear for Panc-1. In BxPC3 SCDCLs, enriched signaling pathways EMT, TNF signaling via NfKB, and IL2STAT5 signaling correlated with more resistant behavior to gemcitabine. In Panc-1 SCDCLs MYC targets V1 and V2 as well as E2F targets were associated with stronger resistance to gemcitabine. Feature extraction of proteomes again identified less proteins whose expression was associated with the response of individual SCDCLs in Panc-1 compared to BxPC3. Based on molecular profiles, we could show that the gemcitabine-resistant SCDCLs of both BxPC3 and Panc-1 are more sensitive to the BET inhibitor JQ1 compared to the respective gemcitabine-sensitive SCDCLs. Conclusions: Our model system of SCDCLs identified gemcitabine-resistant subclones within a parental tumor population and provides evidence for the critical role of ITH for treatment response in pancreatic cancer. Through molecular profiling, we identified specific signaling pathways and protein signatures that might help to explain the differential response to treatment among clones. We exploited these molecular differences for an improved and more targeted therapy of resistant subclones of a heterogeneous tumor.
Project description:SummaryTumour evolution results in progressive cancer phenotypes such as metastatic spread and treatment resistance. To better treat cancers, we must characterize tumour evolution and the genetic events that confer progressive phenotypes. This is facilitated by high coverage genome or exome sequencing. However, the best approach by which, or indeed whether, these data can be used to accurately model and interpret underlying evolutionary dynamics is yet to be confirmed. Establishing this requires sequencing data from appropriately heterogeneous tumours in which the exact trajectory and combination of events occurring throughout its evolution are known. We therefore developed HeteroGenesis: a tool to generate realistically evolved tumour genomes, which can be sequenced using weighted-Wessim (w-Wessim), an in silico exome sequencing tool that we have adapted from previous methods. HeteroGenesis simulates more complex and realistic heterogeneous tumour genomes than existing methods, can model different evolutionary dynamics, and enables the creation of multi-region and longitudinal data.Availability and implementationHeteroGenesis and w-Wessim are freely available under the GNU General Public Licence from https://github.com/GeorgetteTanner, implemented in Python and supported on linux and MS Windows.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Project description:The most widely-used method for detecting genome-wide protein-DNA interactions is chromatin immunoprecipitation on tiling microarrays, commonly known as ChIP-chip. Here, we conducted the first objective analysis of tiling array platforms and analysis algorithms in a simulated ChIP-chip experiment. Mixtures of human genomic DNA and "spike-ins" comprised of nearly 100 human sequences at various concentrations were hybridized to four tiling array platforms by eight independent groups. Blind to the number of spike-ins, their locations, and the range of concentrations, each group made predictions of the spike-in locations. All commercial tiling array platforms performed well, although each platform and analysis algorithm had distinct performance and cost characteristics. Simple sequence repeats and genome redundancy tend to result in false positives on oligonucleotide platforms. The spike-in DNA samples and the resulting array data presented here provide a stable benchmark against which future ChIP platforms, protocol improvements, and analysis methods can be evaluated. Keywords: chip-ChIP simulation For data usage terms and conditions, please refer to http://www.genome.gov/27528022 and http://www.genome.gov/Pages/Research/ENCODE/ENCODEDataReleasePolicyFinal2008.pdf
Project description:N2 worms were cultured in ground control conditions for three weeks, exposed to simulated microgravity for four days. Next, the maintained impact in the gene expression after the exposure was investigated after return to ground condition on days four, eight, and twelve.
Project description:This study provides the first systematic CRIPSR screening of tumour suppressor genes (TSGs) in vivo and identifies bona fide TSGs especially for epigenetic regulators contributing to lung tumour progression. Moreover, our data provides a potential therapeutic strategy for the effective treatment of UTX-mutant lung tumours.