Project description:Background: To date, few studies have systematically characterized microarray gene expression signal performance with degraded RNA from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) specimens in comparison to intact RNA from unfixed fresh-frozen (FF) specimens. Methodology: RNA was extracted and isolated from paired tumor and normal samples from both FFPE and FF kidney, lung and colon tissue specimens. Microarray signal dynamics on both the raw probe and probeset level were evaluated. A contrast metric was developed to directly compare microarray signal derived from RNA extracted from matched FFPE and FF specimens. Gene-level summaries were then compared to determine the degree of overlap in expression profiles. Results: RNA extracted from FFPE material was more degraded and fragmented than FF, resulting in reduced dynamic range of expression signal. It was found that probe performance is not affected uniformly and declines sharply toward 5’ end of genes. The most significant differences in FFPE vs. FF signal were consistent across three tissue types and enriched with ribosomal genes. Significance: Our results show that archived FFPE samples can be used to profile for expression signatures and assess differential expression similar to unfixed tissue sources. This study provides guidelines for application of these methods in the discovery, validation, and clinical application of microarray expression profiling with FFPE material.
Project description:Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues are a vast resource of annotated clinical samples. As such, they represent highly desirable and informative materials for the application of high-definition genomics for improved patient management and to advance the development of personalized therapeutics. However, a limitation of FFPE tissues is the variable quality of DNA extracted for analyses. Furthermore, admixtures of non-tumor and polyclonal neoplastic cell populations limit the number of biopsies that can be studied and make it difficult to define cancer genomes in patient samples. To exploit these valuable tissues, we applied flow cytometry-based methods to isolate pure populations of tumor cell nuclei from FFPE tissues and developed a methodology compatible with oligonucleotide array CGH and whole exome sequencing analyses. These were used to profile a variety of tumors (breast, brain, bladder, ovarian and pancreas), including the genomes and exomes of matching fresh frozen and FFPE pancreatic adenocarcinoma samples.
Project description:Here, we present FACT-Seq, a highly sensitive method to decode the histone modifications in FFPE tissues. The FACT-Seq generates the high-quality chromatin profiles from both active and silent histone modifications with 1000 nuclei purified from a single FFPE tissue section, and reveals the disease-specific super enhancers in the FFPE archived human colorectal and human glioblastoma multiforme cancer tissue. In summary, the approach allows decoding the histone modifications that regulate gene expression in archival FFPE tissues with high sensitivity, in order to better understand epigenetic regulation in cancer and precision medicine.
Project description:For more than a century, Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) sample preparation has been the preferred method for long-term preservation of biological material. However, the use of FFPE samples for epigenomic studies has been difficult because of chromatin damage from long exposure to high concentrations of formaldehyde. Previously, we introduced Cleavage Under Targeted Accessible Chromatin (CUTAC), an antibody-targeted chromatin accessibility mapping protocol based on CUT&Tag. Here we show that simple modifications of our single-tube CUTAC protocol are sufficient to produce high-resolution maps of paused RNA Polymerase II (RNAPII) at enhancers and promoters using FFPE samples. We find that transcriptional regulatory element differences produced by FFPE-CUTAC distinguish between mouse brain tumor specimens and identify regulatory element markers with high confidence and precision. Our simple workflow is suitable for automation, making possible affordable epigenomic profiling of archived biological samples for biomarker identification, clinical applications and retrospective studies.
Project description:Genome wide DNA methylation profiling of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) meningioma samples. The Illumina Infinium MethylationEPIC BeadChip was used to obtain DNA methylation profiles across approximately 850,000 methylation sites across the genome at single-nucleotide resolution.
Project description:Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples are the only remaining biological archive for many toxicological and clinical studies, yet their use in genomics has been limited due to variability in RNA quality from formalin fixation. Older FFPE samples, which often have highly degraded RNA, pose a particularly difficult technical challenge. Recent developments in probe-based targeted sequencing technologies show promise in addressing this issue, while also being more cost effective than traditional RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) methods. In the current study, we evaluated dose-dependent transcriptional changes from paired frozen and archival FFPE liver samples stored for over 20 years using targeted resequencing (TempO-Seq) and whole-genome RNA-seq methods. Samples were originally collected from male mice exposed to a reference chemical (dichloroacetic acid, DCA) at 0, 198, 313 and 427 mg/kg-day, (n=6/dose) by drinking water for 6 days. TempO-Seq showed high overlap in differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between matched FFPE and flash-frozen (FROZ) samples and concordance in fold-changes across the highest two dose levels of DCA vs. control (R2 ≥ 0.94). Similarly, high concordance in fold-changes was observed between TempO-Seq FFPE and RNA-seq FROZ results (R2 ≥ 0.92). Only 28 DEGs or fewer were identified in RNA-seq FFPE samples. Modeling of DCA-dependent changes in gene sets identified benchmark doses from TempO-Seq FROZ and FFPE samples that were within 1.4-fold of RNA-seq FROZ samples (93.9 mg/kg-d), whereas RNA-seq FFPE samples were 3.3-fold higher (310.3 mg/kg-d). This work demonstrates that targeted sequencing may provide a more robust method for quantifying gene expression profiles from aged archival FFPE samples.