4,781 research outputs found
Seed-effect modeling improves the consistency of genome-wide loss-of-function screens and identifies synthetic lethal vulnerabilities in cancer cells
Background: Genome-wide loss-of-function profiling is widely used for systematic identification of genetic dependencies in cancer cells; however, the poor reproducibility of RNA interference (RNAi) screens has been a major concern due to frequent off-target effects. Currently, a detailed understanding of the key factors contributing to the sub-optimal consistency is still a lacking, especially on how to improve the reliability of future RNAi screens by controlling for factors that determine their off-target propensity. Methods: We performed a systematic, quantitative analysis of the consistency between two genome-wide shRNA screens conducted on a compendium of cancer cell lines, and also compared several gene summarization methods for inferring gene essentiality from shRNA level data. We then devised novel concepts of seed essentiality and shRNA family, based on seed region sequences of shRNAs, to study in-depth the contribution of seed-mediated off-target effects to the consistency of the two screens. We further investigated two seed-sequence properties, seed pairing stability, and target abundance in terms of their capability to minimize the off-target effects in post-screening data analysis. Finally, we applied this novel methodology to identify genetic interactions and synthetic lethal partners of cancer drivers, and confirmed differential essentiality phenotypes by detailed CRISPR/Cas9 experiments. Results: Using the novel concepts of seed essentiality and shRNA family, we demonstrate how genome-wide loss-of-function profiling of a common set of cancer cell lines can be actually made fairly reproducible when considering seed-mediated off-target effects. Importantly, by excluding shRNAs having higher propensity for off-target effects, based on their seed-sequence properties, one can remove noise from the genome-wide shRNA datasets. As a translational application case, we demonstrate enhanced reproducibility of genetic interaction partners of common cancer drivers, as well as identify novel synthetic lethal partners of a major oncogenic driver, PIK3CA, supported by a complementary CRISPR/Cas9 experiment. Conclusions: We provide practical guidelines for improved design and analysis of genome-wide loss-of-function profiling and demonstrate how this novel strategy can be applied towards improved mapping of genetic dependencies of cancer cells to aid development of targeted anticancer treatments.Peer reviewe
Assembly of an interactive correlation network for the Arabidopsis genome using a novel heuristic clustering algorithm
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Unbiased Boolean analysis of public gene expression data for cell cycle gene identification.
Cell proliferation is essential for the development and maintenance of all organisms and is dysregulated in cancer. Using synchronized cells progressing through the cell cycle, pioneering microarray studies defined cell cycle genes based on cyclic variation in their expression. However, the concordance of the small number of synchronized cell studies has been limited, leading to discrepancies in definition of the transcriptionally regulated set of cell cycle genes within and between species. Here we present an informatics approach based on Boolean logic to identify cell cycle genes. This approach used the vast array of publicly available gene expression data sets to query similarity to CCNB1, which encodes the cyclin subunit of the Cdk1-cyclin B complex that triggers the G2-to-M transition. In addition to highlighting conservation of cell cycle genes across large evolutionary distances, this approach identified contexts where well-studied genes known to act during the cell cycle are expressed and potentially acting in nondivision contexts. An accessible web platform enables a detailed exploration of the cell cycle gene lists generated using the Boolean logic approach. The methods employed are straightforward to extend to processes other than the cell cycle
RNase HI Is Essential for Survival of Mycobacterium smegmatis
RNases H are involved in the removal of RNA from RNA/DNA hybrids. Type I RNases H
are thought to recognize and cleave the RNA/DNA duplex when at least four ribonucleotides
are present. Here we investigated the importance of RNase H type I encoding genes
for model organism Mycobacterium smegmatis. By performing gene replacement through
homologous recombination, we demonstrate that each of the two presumable RNase H
type I encoding genes, rnhA and MSMEG4305, can be removed from M. smegmatis genome
without affecting the growth rate of the mutant. Further, we demonstrate that deletion
of both RNases H type I encoding genes in M. smegmatis leads to synthetic lethality. Finally,
we question the possibility of existence of RNase HI related alternative mode of initiation
of DNA replication in M. smegmatis, the process initially discovered in Escherichia coli. We
suspect that synthetic lethality of double mutant lacking RNases H type I is caused by formation
of R-loops leading to collapse of replication forks. We report Mycobacterium smegmatis
as the first bacterial species, where function of RNase H type I has been found
essential.The study was supported by
POIG.01.01.02-10-107/09 project implemented under
Innovative Economy Operational Programme, years
2007–2013 "Studies of the molecular mechanisms at
the interface the human organism - the pathogen -
environmental factors" and by grant of Polish National
Center of Science 2011/01/N/NZ6/04186
“Identification of a novel mechanism of initiation of
DNA replication in Mycobacterium smegmatis”
Characterizing genomic alterations in cancer by complementary functional associations.
Systematic efforts to sequence the cancer genome have identified large numbers of mutations and copy number alterations in human cancers. However, elucidating the functional consequences of these variants, and their interactions to drive or maintain oncogenic states, remains a challenge in cancer research. We developed REVEALER, a computational method that identifies combinations of mutually exclusive genomic alterations correlated with functional phenotypes, such as the activation or gene dependency of oncogenic pathways or sensitivity to a drug treatment. We used REVEALER to uncover complementary genomic alterations associated with the transcriptional activation of β-catenin and NRF2, MEK-inhibitor sensitivity, and KRAS dependency. REVEALER successfully identified both known and new associations, demonstrating the power of combining functional profiles with extensive characterization of genomic alterations in cancer genomes
Efficient algorithms to discover alterations with complementary functional association in cancer
Recent large cancer studies have measured somatic alterations in an
unprecedented number of tumours. These large datasets allow the identification
of cancer-related sets of genetic alterations by identifying relevant
combinatorial patterns. Among such patterns, mutual exclusivity has been
employed by several recent methods that have shown its effectivenes in
characterizing gene sets associated to cancer. Mutual exclusivity arises
because of the complementarity, at the functional level, of alterations in
genes which are part of a group (e.g., a pathway) performing a given function.
The availability of quantitative target profiles, from genetic perturbations or
from clinical phenotypes, provides additional information that can be leveraged
to improve the identification of cancer related gene sets by discovering groups
with complementary functional associations with such targets.
In this work we study the problem of finding groups of mutually exclusive
alterations associated with a quantitative (functional) target. We propose a
combinatorial formulation for the problem, and prove that the associated
computation problem is computationally hard. We design two algorithms to solve
the problem and implement them in our tool UNCOVER. We provide analytic
evidence of the effectiveness of UNCOVER in finding high-quality solutions and
show experimentally that UNCOVER finds sets of alterations significantly
associated with functional targets in a variety of scenarios. In addition, our
algorithms are much faster than the state-of-the-art, allowing the analysis of
large datasets of thousands of target profiles from cancer cell lines. We show
that on one such dataset from project Achilles our methods identify several
significant gene sets with complementary functional associations with targets.Comment: Accepted at RECOMB 201
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