Abstract
Background: Neuroblastoma is a pediatric malignancy with a high frequency of metastatic disease at initial diagnosis. Neuroblastoma tumors have few recurrent protein-coding mutations but contain extensive somatic copy number alterations (SCNAs) suggesting that mutations that alter gene dosage are important drivers of tumorigenesis. Here, we analyze allele-specific expression in 96 high-risk neuroblastoma tumors to discover genes impacted by cis-acting mutations that alter dosage. Results: We identify 1043 genes with recurrent, neuroblastoma-specific allele-specific expression. While most of these genes lie within common SCNA regions, many of them exhibit allele-specific expression in copy neutral samples and these samples are enriched for mutations that are predicted to cause nonsense-mediated decay. Thus, both SCNA and non-SCNA mutations frequently alter gene expression in neuroblastoma. We focus on genes with neuroblastoma-specific allele-specific expression in the absence of SCNAs and find 26 such genes that have reduced expression in stage 4 disease. At least two of these genes have evidence for tumor suppressor activity including the transcription factor TFAP2B and the protein tyrosine phosphatase PTPRH. Conclusions: In summary, our allele-specific expression analysis discovers genes that are recurrently dysregulated by both large SCNAs and other cis-acting mutations in high-risk neuroblastoma.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 71 |
Journal | Genome Biology |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 4 2022 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Genetics
- Cell Biology