Edgetic perturbation signatures represent known and novel cancer biomarkers

Sci Rep. 2020 Mar 9;10(1):4350. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-61422-3.

Abstract

Isoform switching is a recently characterized hallmark of cancer, and often translates to the loss or gain of domains mediating protein interactions and thus, the re-wiring of the interactome. Recent computational tools leverage domain-domain interaction data to resolve the condition-specific interaction networks from RNA-Seq data accounting for the domain content of the primary transcripts expressed. Here, we used The Cancer Genome Atlas RNA-Seq datasets to generate 642 patient-specific pairs of interactomes corresponding to both the tumor and the healthy tissues across 13 cancer types. The comparison of these interactomes provided a list of patient-specific edgetic perturbations of the interactomes associated with the cancerous state. We found that among the identified perturbations, select sets are robustly shared between patients at the multi-cancer, cancer-specific and cancer sub-type specific levels. Interestingly, the majority of the alterations do not directly involve significantly mutated genes, nevertheless, they strongly correlate with patient survival. The findings (available at EdgeExplorer: "http://webclu.bio.wzw.tum.de/EdgeExplorer") are a new source of potential biomarkers for classifying cancer types and the proteins we identified are potential anti-cancer therapy targets.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Biomarkers, Tumor*
  • Computational Biology / methods
  • Disease Susceptibility*
  • Gene Expression Profiling
  • Humans
  • Neoplasms / etiology*
  • Neoplasms / metabolism*
  • Neoplasms / mortality
  • Neoplasms / pathology
  • Prognosis
  • Protein Interaction Mapping
  • Protein Isoforms
  • Structure-Activity Relationship

Substances

  • Biomarkers, Tumor
  • Protein Isoforms