Project description:Exploiting the full potential of insertional mutagenesis screens with retroviruses and transposons requires methods for distinguishing clonal from subclonal insertion events within heterogeneous tumor cell populations. Current protocols, based on ligation mediated PCR, depend on endonuclease based fragmentation of genomic DNA, resulting in strong biases in amplification and sequencing due to a fixed product sizes of the amplicon. We have developed a method called shear-splink, which enables the semi-quantitative high-throughput sequence analysis of insertional mutations, enabling us to count the number of cells harboring a given integration, within a heterogeneous sample. The shear-splink method enriches for (sub)clonal integrations, thereby reducing the contribution of irrelevant passenger mutations normally hampering a reliable identification of common integration sites. Additionally, this improvement allows us to identify genetic interactions between affected genes, co-occurring mutations and to study acquired resistance mechanisms both in vivo and in vitro.
Project description:Exploiting the full potential of insertional mutagenesis screens with retroviruses and transposons requires methods for distinguishing clonal from subclonal insertion events within heterogeneous tumor cell populations. Current protocols, based on ligation mediated PCR, depend on endonuclease based fragmentation of genomic DNA, resulting in strong biases in amplification and sequencing due to a fixed product sizes of the amplicon. We have developed a method called shear-splink, which enables the semi-quantitative high-throughput sequence analysis of insertional mutations, enabling us to count the number of cells harboring a given integration, within a heterogeneous sample. The shear-splink method enriches for (sub)clonal integrations, thereby reducing the contribution of irrelevant passenger mutations normally hampering a reliable identification of common integration sites. Additionally, this improvement allows us to identify genetic interactions between affected genes, co-occurring mutations and to study acquired resistance mechanisms both in vivo and in vitro. Sequencing of retrovrial integration sites by LM-PCR. The associated manuscript describes a new method to quantitatively determine retrovrial integration sites using an improved ligation-mediated PCR approach and subsequent 454 pyrosequencing. [GSM562151 to GSM562159]: Sequence data from different mixtures of 2 different cell lines (called AE6 and BB12) which are processed without a restriction enzyme. These cell lines are derived from an MMTV induced mammary tumor, for which we amplify the MMTV integration sites using a ligation-mediated PCR setup. We mixed these 2 cell lines, both with a different integration spectrum, to determine whether our amplification and sequencing protocol is quantitative, meaning that the coverage per integration site is decreasing upon a further dilution of the sample. [GSM641935 to GSM641950]: Unique Sleeping beauty induced lymphoma specimens (spleen) obtained from a cohort of 16 wild-type mice with the 129P2/C57BL/6J mixed background. [GSM776576 to GSM776956]: The 379 submitted specimens are originating from 127 unique leukemia/lymphoma samples, processed using 3 different techniques in order to identify Sleeping Beauty integration sites. We compared restriction enzyme based LM-PCR (RE-splink) with shearing based LM-PCR (shear-splink) on 127 unique Sleeping Beauty (SB) induced leukemia's/lymphomas. All sequence data generated by the 454 sequencing platform are submitted to GEO, including the final output of our sequence analysis pipeline (in bed format; see Supplementary files linked below). Previous submissions contained similar sequence information (integration sites of viruses or transposons driving tumorigenesis) and are all part of the same manuscript.
Project description:Somatic transposon mutagenesis in mice is an efficient strategy to investigate the genetic mechanisms of tumorigenesis. The identification of tumor driving transposon insertions traditionally requires the generation of large tumor cohorts to obtain information about common insertion sites. Tumor driving insertions are also characterized by their clonal expansion in tumor tissue, a phenomenon that is facilitated by the slow and evolving transformation process of transposon mutagenesis. We describe here an improved approach for the detection of tumor driving insertions that assesses the clonal expansion of insertions by quantifying the relative proportion of sequence reads obtained in individual tumors. To this end, we have developed a protocol for insertion site sequencing that utilizes acoustic shearing of tumor DNA and Illumina sequencing. We analyzed various solid tumors generated by PiggyBac mutagenesis and for each tumor >10^6 reads corresponding to >10^4 insertion sites were obtained. In each tumor, 9 to 25 insertions stood out by their enriched sequence read frequencies when compared to frequencies obtained from tail DNA controls. These enriched insertions are potential clonally expanded tumor driving insertions, and thus identify candidate cancer genes. The candidate cancer genes of our study comprised many established cancer genes, but also novel candidate genes such as Mastermind-like1 (Mamld1) and Diacylglycerolkinase delta (Dgkd). We show that clonal expansion analysis by high-throughput sequencing is a robust approach for the identification of candidate cancer genes in insertional mutagenesis screens on the level of individual tumors. Solid tumors in mice were generated by somatic transposon mutagenesis with a PiggyBac transposon system. Insertion sites of transposons in 11 tumors and 6 non-cancerous tail controls were determined by Illumina high-throughput sequencing. Insertions were determined both on 5' and 3' sides of the transposon (PB5 and PB3, respectively). Quantitative analysis of read numbers revealed enrichment of certain insertions in tumors, but not in controls, and these enriched insertions identify candidate cancer genes.
Project description:Acute megakaryoblastic leukemia (AMKL) is a heterogeneous disease generally associated with poor prognosis. Gene expression profiles indicate the existence of distinct molecular subgroups, and several genetic alterations have been characterized in the past years, including the t(1;22)(p13;q13) and the trisomy 21 associated with GATA1 mutations. However, the majority of patients do not present known mutations, and the limited access to primary patient leukemic cells impedes the efficient development of novel therapeutic strategies. In this study, using a xenotransplantation approach, we have modeled human pediatric AMKL in immunodeficient mice. Analysis of high-throughput RNA sequencing identified recurrent fusion genes defining new molecular subgroups.
Project description:High throughput quantitative whole transcriptome analysis of individual macrophages 7 days post-pneumonectomy in a B6 CSF1R-GFP mouse