Splicing imbalances in basal-like breast cancer underpin perturbation of cell surface and oncogenic pathways and are associated with patients' survival.
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Date
2017-01-06ICR Author
Author
Gracio, F
Burford, B
Gazinska, P
Mera, A
Mohd Noor, A
Marra, P
Gillett, C
Grigoriadis, A
Pinder, S
Tutt, A
de Rinaldis, E
Type
Journal Article
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Despite advancements in the use of transcriptional information to understand and classify breast cancers, the contribution of splicing to the establishment and progression of these tumours has only recently starting to emerge. Our work explores this lesser known landscape, with special focus on the basal-like breast cancer subtype where limited therapeutic opportunities and no prognostic biomarkers are currently available. Using ExonArray analysis of 176 breast cancers and 9 normal breast tissues we demonstrate that splicing levels significantly contribute to the diversity of breast cancer molecular subtypes and explain much of the differences compared with normal tissues. We identified pathways specifically affected by splicing imbalances whose perturbation would be hidden from a conventional gene-centric analysis of gene expression. We found that a large fraction of them involve cell-to-cell communication, extracellular matrix and transport, as well as oncogenic and immune-related pathways transduced by plasma membrane receptors. We identified 247 genes in which splicing imbalances are associated with clinical patients' outcome, whilst no association was detectable at the gene expression level. These include the signaling gene TGFBR1, the proto-oncogene MYB as well as many immune-related genes such as CCR7 and FCRL3, reinforcing evidence for a role of immune components in influencing breast cancer patients' prognosis.
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Subject
Humans
Breast Neoplasms
Membrane Proteins
Signal Transduction
Gene Expression
Gene Expression Regulation, Neoplastic
Alternative Splicing
Exons
Female
Carcinogenesis
Language
eng
Date accepted
2016-12-05
License start date
2017-01-06
Citation
Scientific reports, 2017, 7 pp. 40177 - ?
Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO