Project description:This study investigates the impact of Sox10 enhancer deletion on transcriptional plasticity and drug resistance in melanoma cell lines.
Project description:Here, we combine comparative regulatory genomics with machine learning to investigate enhancer logic in melanoma. Through epigenomics profiling of 26 melanoma cell lines across six species, we examine the conservation of the two main melanoma states and underlying master regulators. By training a deep neural network on topic models derived from the human lines, we were able to classify not only human melanoma enhancers, but also regulatory regions in the other species. The deep learning model revealed important genomic features (i.e. TF binding motifs) for the different melanoma states, how they co-occur within melanoma enhancers, and where they are placed with respect to the central enhancer nucleosome. This in-depth analysis of the melanoma enhancer code allowed us to propose a mechanistic model of TF binding in MEL melanoma enhancers. Finally, by exploiting the deep layers of our model, we are able to identify causal mutations for melanoma enhancer loss and gain through evolution, not only affecting enhancer accessibility but also activity.
Project description:We measured changes in H3K27ac-marked enhancer contacts before and after treatment of human breast cancer cell lines with abemaciclib
Project description:Thousands of enhancers are characterized in the human genome, yet few have been shown important in cancer. Inhibiting oncokinases, such as EGFR, ALK, HER2, and BRAF, is a mainstay of current cancer therapy but is hindered by innate drug resistance mediated by upregulation of the HGF receptor, MET. The mechanisms mediating such genomic responses to targeted therapy are unknown. Here, we identify lineage-specific MET enhancers for multiple common tumor types, including a melanoma lineage-specific MET enhancer that displays inducible chromatin looping and MET gene induction upon BRAF inhibition. Epigenomic analysis demonstrated that the melanocyte-specific transcription factor, MITF, mediates this enhancer function. Targeted genomic deletion (<7bp) of the MITF motif within the MET enhancer suppressed inducible chromatin looping and innate drug resistance, while maintaining MITF-dependent, inhibitor-induced melanoma cell differentiation. Epigenomic analysis can thus guide functional disruption of regulatory DNA to decouple pro- and anti-oncogenic functions of tumor lineage-enriched transcription factors mediating innate resistance to oncokinase therapy. MITF ChIP-seq was performed in primary human melanocytes with overexpression of BRAFV600E or a lentiviral control (RFP), and in COLO829 melanoma cells treated with DMSO, or PLX4032
