Loris Mularoni | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2016

Discovery of Cancer Driver Long Noncoding RNAs across 1112 Tumour Genomes: New Candidates and Distinguishing Features.

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) represent a vast unexplored genetic space that may hold missing drivers of tumourigenesis, but few such \"driver lncRNAs\" are known. Until now, they have been discovered through changes in expression, leading to problems in distinguishing between causative roles and passenger effects. We here present a different approach for driver lncRNA discovery using mutational patterns in tumour DNA. Our pipeline, ExInAtor, identifies genes with excess load of somatic single nucleotide variants (SNVs) across panels of tumour genomes. Heterogeneity in mutational signatures between cancer types and individuals is accounted for using a simple local trinucleotide background model, which yields high precision and low computational demands. We use ExInAtor to predict drivers from the GENCODE annotation across 1112 entire genomes from 23 cancer types. Using a stratified approach, we identify 15 high-confidence candidates: 9 novel and 6 known cancer-related genes, including MALAT1, NEAT1 and SAMMSON. Both known and novel driver lncRNAs are distinguished by elevated gene length, evolutionary conservation and expression. We have presented a first catalogue of mutated lncRNA genes driving cancer, which will grow and improve with the application of ExInAtor to future tumour genome projects.

Cancer Biology↗

bioRxiv2015

Nucleotide excision repair is impaired by binding of transcription factors to DNA

Somatic mutations are the driving force of cancer genome evolution1. The rate of somatic mutations appears in great variability across the genome due to chromatin organization, DNA accessibility and replication timing2-5. However, other variables that may influence the mutation rate locally, such as DNA-binding proteins, are unknown. Here we demonstrate that the rate of somatic mutations in melanoma tumors is highly increased at active Transcription Factor binding sites (TFBS) and nucleosome embedded DNA, compared to their flanking regions. Using recently available excision-repair sequencing (XR-seq) data6, we show that the higher mutation rate at these sites is caused by a decrease of the levels of nucleotide excision repair (NER) activity. Therefore, our work demonstrates that DNA-bound proteins interfere with the NER machinery, which results in an increased rate of mutations at their binding sites. This finding has important implications in our understanding of mutational and DNA repair processes and in the identification of cancer driver mutations.

Genomics↗