scholarly journals SplitThreader: Exploration and analysis of rearrangements in cancer genomes

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Nattestad ◽  
Marley C. Alford ◽  
Fritz J. Sedlazeck ◽  
Michael C. Schatz

AbstractGenomic rearrangements and associated copy number changes are important drivers in cancer as they can alter the expression of oncogenes and tumor suppressors, create gene fusions, and misregulate gene expression. Here we present SplitThreader (http://splitthreader.com), an open-source interactive web application for analysis and visualization of genomic rearrangements and copy number variation in cancer genomes. SplitThreader constructs a sequence graph of genomic rearrangements in the sample and uses a priority queue breadth-first search algorithm on the graph to search for novel interactions. This is applied to detect gene fusions and other novel sequences, as well as to evaluate distances in the rearranged genome between any genomic regions of interest, especially the repositioning of regulatory elements and their target genes. SplitThreader also analyzes each variant to categorize it by its relation to other variants and by its copy number concordance. This identifies balanced translocations, identifies simple and complex variants, and suggests likely false positives when copy number is not concordant across a candidate breakpoint. It also provides explanations when multiple variants affect the copy number state and obscure the contribution of a single variant, such as a deletion within a region that is overall amplified. Together, these categories triage the variants into groups and provide a starting point for further systematic analysis and manual curation. To demonstrate its utility, we apply SplitThreader to three cancer cell lines, MCF-7 and A549 with Illumina paired-end sequencing, and SK-BR-3, with long-read PacBio sequencing. Using SplitThreader, we examine the genomic rearrangements responsible for previously observed gene fusions in SK-BR-3 and MCF-7, and discover many of the fusions involved a complex series of multiple genomic rearrangements. We also find notable differences in the types of variants between the three cell lines, in particular a much higher proportion of reciprocal variants in SK-BR-3 and a distinct clustering of interchromosomal variants in SK-BR-3 and MCF-7 that is absent in A549.

Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2547
Author(s):  
Keunsoo Kang ◽  
Yoonjung Choi ◽  
Hyeonjin Moon ◽  
Chaelin You ◽  
Minjin Seo ◽  
...  

RAD51 is a recombinase that plays a pivotal role in homologous recombination. Although the role of RAD51 in homologous recombination has been extensively studied, it is unclear whether RAD51 can be involved in gene regulation as a co-factor. In this study, we found evidence that RAD51 may contribute to the regulation of genes involved in the autophagy pathway with E-box proteins such as USF1, USF2, and/or MITF in GM12878, HepG2, K562, and MCF-7 cell lines. The canonical USF binding motif (CACGTG) was significantly identified at RAD51-bound cis-regulatory elements in all four cell lines. In addition, genome-wide USF1, USF2, and/or MITF-binding regions significantly coincided with the RAD51-associated cis-regulatory elements in the same cell line. Interestingly, the promoters of genes associated with the autophagy pathway, such as ATG3 and ATG5, were significantly occupied by RAD51 and regulated by RAD51 in HepG2 and MCF-7 cell lines. Taken together, these results unveiled a novel role of RAD51 and provided evidence that RAD51-associated cis-regulatory elements could possibly be involved in regulating autophagy-related genes with E-box binding proteins.


Database ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Dalfovo ◽  
Samuel Valentini ◽  
Alessandro Romanel

Abstract Understanding the interaction between human genome regulatory elements and transcription factors is fundamental to elucidate the structure of gene regulatory networks. Here we present CONREL, a web application that allows for the exploration of functionally annotated transcriptional ‘consensus’ regulatory elements at different levels of abstraction. CONREL provides an extensive collection of consensus promoters, enhancers and active enhancers for 198 cell-lines across 38 tissue types, which are also combined to provide global consensuses. In addition, 1000 Genomes Project genotype data and the ‘total binding affinity’ of thousands of transcription factor binding motifs at genomic regulatory elements is fully combined and exploited to characterize and annotate functional properties of our collection. Comparison with other available resources highlights the strengths and advantages of CONREL. CONREL can be used to explore genomic loci, specific genes or genomic regions of interest across different cell lines and tissue types. The resource is freely available at https://bcglab.cibio.unitn.it/conrel.


Author(s):  
Kasim S. Hmood ◽  
Ammar A. Razzak Mahmood Kubba ◽  
Redha I Al-bayati ◽  
Abdulrahman M. Saleh

A new series of flurbiprofen derivatives containing thiosemicarbazide moiety (3-7)  was  synthesized from flurbiprofen as parent nucleus by  esterification, hydrazide formation, and  heating with different  aryl isothiocyanate substituents, respectively. Flurbiprofen was also treated with thiosemicarbazide in the  presence POCl3 as  a catalyst,   to produce 1,3,4 -thiadiazole -2-amine (8). Treatment of (8) with different aryl isothiocyanates  produced thiourea derivatives (9-12).  Also, the reaction of  (8)  with different benzoyl chloride substituents produced benzamide compounds (13-15). Eventually , treatment of (8)  with  ethyl acetoacetate(EAA) produced [1,3,4]thiadiazolo[3,2-a]pyrimidin-7-one (16) .The new compounds were  characterized by spectroscopic techniques :FTIR,  1HNMR, and CHNS analysis. A molecular docking  study for  the  synthesized compounds (3-16), against the Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor receptor (VEGFR-2) was applied   and  it  indicated  that compounds 4,7,13, and 15,exhibited the optimum binding energy of     -6.77, -6.12,-6.68, and -6.43 kcal/mol, respectively. Target compounds were  also assessed  for their  in vitro anticancer effects  in a cell-line study. All  of the compounds tested  showed  the most plausible anticancer activity, compared to a positive control(Sorafenib), using in vitro  MTT cytotoxic assay ,against human breast tumor (MCF-7), and normal WRL-68 cell line. The in vitro results revealed that compounds 4,5,10,11,13, and 15 exhibited the highest inhibitory activity at their IC50 concentrations, against MCF-7 cell lines, as follows (122.7,113.9,95,7. 109.1,40.32 and 112.29µg/mL, respectively. While their cytotoxic effect against normal WRL-68 cell line at  their IC50 concentrations, as follow 210.2, 181.3 ,151.7,278.7,80.28, and 236 µg/mL, respectively, therefore,  such compounds were considered more selective toward MCF-7 than normal WRL-68,and their selectivity index (SI): 1.71,1.59,1.59 ,2.55 ,1.99 , and 2.10,respectively . Among the synthesized compounds, the compound 15 was chosen to screen its effect in vitro through multi-parameter cytotoxic assay against MCF-7 breast cancer implemented in High Content Screening (ArrayScan XTI, Thermo Scientific),which  could be taken in consideration as a starting point for the  development  of new anticancer drugs


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhijit Chakraborty ◽  
Ferhat Ay

AbstractMotivationEukaryotic chromosomes adapt a complex and highly dynamic three-dimensional (3D) structure, which profoundly affects different cellular functions and outcomes including changes in epigenetic landscape and in gene expression. Making the scenario even more complex, cancer cells harbor chromosomal abnormalities (e.g., copy number variations (CNVs) and translocations) altering their genomes both at the sequence level and at the level of 3D organization. High-throughput chromosome conformation capture techniques (e.g., Hi-C), which are originally developed for decoding the 3D structure of the chromatin, provide a great opportunity to simultaneously identify the locations of genomic rearrangements and to investigate the 3D genome organization in cancer cells. Even though Hi-C data has been used for validating known rearrangements, computational methods that can distinguish rearrangement signals from the inherent biases of Hi-C data and from the actual 3D conformation of chromatin, and can precisely detect rearrangement locations de novo have been missing.ResultsIn this work, we characterize how intra and inter-chromosomal Hi-C contacts are distributed for normal and rearranged chromosomes to devise a new set of algorithms (i) to identify genomic segments that correspond to CNV regions such as amplifications and deletions (HiCnv), (ii) to call inter-chromosomal translocations and their boundaries (HiCtrans) from Hi-C experiments, and (iii) to simulate Hi-C data from genomes with desired rearrangements and abnormalities (AveSim) in order to select optimal parameters for and to benchmark the accuracy of our methods. Our results on 10 different cancer cell lines with Hi-C data show that we identify a total number of 105 amplifications and 45 deletions together with 90 translocations, whereas we identify virtually no such events for two karyotypically normal cell lines. Our CNV predictions correlate very well with whole genome sequencing (WGS) data among chromosomes with CNV events for a breast cancer cell line (r=0.89) and capture most of the CNVs we simulate using Avesim. For HiCtrans predictions, we report evidence from the literature for 30 out of 90 translocations for eight of our cancer cell lines. Further-more, we show that our tools identify and correctly classify relatively understudied rearrangements such as double minutes (DMs) and homogeneously staining regions (HSRs).ConclusionsConsidering the inherent limitations of existing techniques for karyotyping (i.e., missing balanced rearrangements and those near repetitive regions), the accurate identification of CNVs and translocations in a cost-effective and high-throughput setting is still a challenge. Our results show that the set of tools we develop effectively utilize moderately sequenced Hi-C libraries (100-300 million reads) to identify known and de novo chromosomal rearrangements/abnormalities in well-established cancer cell lines. With the decrease in required number of cells and the increase in attainable resolution, we believe that our framework will pave the way towards comprehensive mapping of genomic rearrangements in primary cells from cancer patients using Hi-C.AvailabilityCNV calling: https://github.com/ay-lab/HiCnvTranslocation calling: https://github.com/ay-lab/HiCtransHi-C simulation: https://github.com/ay-lab/AveSim


Endocrinology ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 147 (12) ◽  
pp. 5845-5854 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique H. A. Kester ◽  
George G. J. M. Kuiper ◽  
Rogier Versteeg ◽  
Theo J. Visser

Type I iodothyronine deiodinase (D1) and type II iodothyronine deiodinase (D2) catalyze the activation of the prohormone T4 to the active hormone T3; type III iodothyronine deiodinase (D3) catalyzes the inactivation of T4 and T3. D3 is highly expressed in brain, placenta, pregnant uterus, and fetal tissues and plays an important role in regulating thyroid hormone bioavailability during fetal development. We examined the activity of the different deiodinases in human cell lines and investigated the regulation of D3 activity and mRNA expression in these cell lines, as well as its possible coexpression with neighboring genes Dlk1 and Dio3os, which may also be especially important during development. D1 activity and mRNA were only found in HepG2 hepatocarcinoma cells, and D2 activity was observed in none of the cell lines. D3 activity and mRNA was found in ECC-1 endometrium carcinoma cells, MCF-7 mammacarcinoma cells, WRL-68 embryonic liver cells, and SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells, but not in the HepG2 hepatocarcinoma cell line or in any choriocarcinoma or astrocytoma cell line. We demonstrated that the phorbol ester 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate increased D3 activity 2- to 9-fold in ECC-1, MCF-7, WRL-68, and SH-SY5Y cells. Estradiol increased D3 activity 3-fold in ECC-1, but not in any other cells. Dexamethasone decreased D3 activity in WRL-68 cells only in the absence of fetal calf serum. Incubation with retinoids increased D3 activity 2- to 3-fold in ECC-1, WRL-68, and MCF-7 cells but decreased D3 activity in SH-SY5Y cells. D3 expression in the different cells was not affected by cAMP or thyroid hormone. Interestingly, D3 mRNA expression in the different cell lines strongly correlated with Dio3os mRNA expression and in a large set of neuroblastoma cell lines also with Dlk1 expression. In conclusion, we identified different human D3-expressing cell lines, in which the regulation of D3 expression is cell type-specific. Our data suggest that estradiol may be one of the factors contributing to the induction of D3 activity in the pregnant uterus and that in addition to gene-specific regulatory elements, more distant common regulatory elements also may be involved in the regulation of D3 expression.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan Fragis ◽  
Abdulmonem I. Murayyan ◽  
Suresh Neethirajan

Background: Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths among Canadian women. Cancer management through changes in lifestyle, such as increased intake of foods rich in dietary flavonoids, have been shown to decrease the risk associated with breast, liver, colorectal, and upper-digestive cancers in epidemiologic studies. Onions are high in flavonoid content and one of the most common vegetables. Additionally, onions are used in most Canadian cuisines.Methods: We investigated the effect of five prominent Ontario grown onion (Stanley, Ruby Ring, LaSalle, Fortress, and Safrane) extracts on two subtypes of breast cancer cell lines: a triple negative breast cancer line MDA-MB-231 and an ER+ breast cancer line MCF-7.Results: These onion extracts elicited strong anti-proliferative, anti-migratory, and cytotoxic activities on both the cancer cell lines. Flavonoids present in these onion extracts induced apoptosis, cell cycle arrest in the G2/M phase, and a reduction in mitochondrial membrane potential at dose-dependent concentrations. Onion extracts were more effective against MDA-MB-231 compared to the MCF-7 cell line. Conclusion: In this study, we investigated the extracts synthesized from Ontario-grown onion varieties in inducing anti-migratory, cytostatic, and cytotoxic activities in two sub-types of human breast cancer cell lines. Anti-tumor activity of these extracts depends upon the varietal and can be formulated into nutraceuticals and functional foods for the wellbeing of cancer patients. Overall, the results suggest that onion extracts are a good source of flavonoids with anti-cancerous properties.Keywords: onion extracts; flavonoids; anti-proliferative; breast cancer; cytotoxic activity


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarek Faris ◽  
Gamaleldin I. Harisa ◽  
Fars K. Alanazi ◽  
Mohamed M. Badran ◽  
Afraa Mohammad Alotaibi ◽  
...  

Aim: This study aimed to explore an affordable technique for the fabrication of Chitosan Nanoshuttles (CSNS) at the ultrafine nanoscale less than 100 nm with improved physicochemical properties, and cytotoxicity on the MCF-7 cell line. Background: Despite several studies reported that the antitumor effect of CS and CSNS could achieve intracellular compartment target ability, no enough available about this issue and further studies are required to address this assumption. Objectives: The objective of the current study was to investigate the potential processing variables for the production of ultrafine CSNS (> 100 nm) using Box-Benhken Design factorial design (BBD). This was achieved through a study of the effects of processing factors, such as CS concentration, CS/TPP ratio, and pH of the CS solution, on PS, PDI, and ZP. Moreover, the obtained CSNS was evaluated for physicochemical characteristics, morphology Also, hemocompatibility, and cytotoxicity using Red Blood Cells (RBCs) and MCF-7 cell lines were investigated. Methods: Box-Benhken Design factorial design (BBD) was used in the analysis of different selected variables. The effects of CS concentration, sodium tripolyphosphate (TPP) ratio, and pH on particle size, Polydispersity Index (PDI), and Zeta Potential (ZP) were measured. Subsequently, the prepared CS nanoshuttles were exposed to stability studies, physicochemical characterization, hemocompatibility, and cytotoxicity using red blood cells and MCF-7 cell lines as surrogate models for in vivo study. Result: The present results revealed that the optimized CSNS have ultrafine nanosize, (78.3±0.22 nm), homogenous with PDI (0.131±0.11), and ZP (31.9±0.25 mV). Moreover, CSNS have a spherical shape, amorphous in structure, and physically stable. Also, CSNS has biological safety as indicated by a gentle effect on red blood cell hemolysis, besides, the obtained nanoshuttles decrease MCF-7 viability. Conclusion: The present findings concluded that the developed ultrafine CSNS has unique properties with enhanced cytotoxicity. thus promising for use in intracellular organelles drug delivery.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 563-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandrakant Dhondiram Pawar ◽  
Dattatraya Navnath Pansare ◽  
Devanand Baburao Shinde

Background: Thiophene ring forms important building block in medicinal chemistry. Literature reveals that thiophene ring in combination with different groups shows different activity. By keeping these things in mind we have designed and synthesized a new series of amide and sulfonamide coupled thiophene. A series of novel substituted 3-sulfamoylbenzo[b]thiophene-4- carboxamide molecules containing sulfonamide and amide group were designed, synthesized and used for anti-proliferative activity study. Methods: The final compounds 16-36 were synthesized by using series of reactions comprising sulfonation, sulfonamide coupling, hydrolysis and peptide coupling. The yields of compounds 16- 36 are in the range of 90-98%. The structures of the synthesized compounds were elucidated and confirmed by 1H NMR, 13C NMR, LCMS and the purity was checked through HPLC analysis. The compounds were further tested for their in vitro anticancer activity against a series of cell lines A549, HeLa, MCF-7 and Du-145. Results: The intermediates 8-13, 15 and final compounds 16-36 were synthesized in good yields. The synthesized compounds were further tested for their anticancer activity and most of compounds showed moderate to good anticancer activity against all four cell lines. Conclusion: We have synthesized 21 compounds and were screened for anticancer activity against MCF-7, HeLa, A-549 and Du-145 cancer cell lines. Most of the compounds were active for tested cell lines with IC50 value in the range of 1.81 to 9.73 μM. The compounds 18, 19, 21, 25, 30, 31 and 33 are most active in cell line data with IC50 value in the range of 1.81 to 2.52 μM.


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