| 1. |
- Breeur, Marie, et al.
(författare)
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Pan-cancer analysis of pre-diagnostic blood metabolite concentrations in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition
- 2022
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Ingår i: BMC Medicine. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 1741-7015. ; 20:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Epidemiological studies of associations between metabolites and cancer risk have typically focused on specific cancer types separately. Here, we designed a multivariate pan-cancer analysis to identify metabolites potentially associated with multiple cancer types, while also allowing the investigation of cancer type-specific associations.Methods: We analysed targeted metabolomics data available for 5828 matched case-control pairs from cancer-specific case-control studies on breast, colorectal, endometrial, gallbladder, kidney, localized and advanced prostate cancer, and hepatocellular carcinoma nested within the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort. From pre-diagnostic blood levels of an initial set of 117 metabolites, 33 cluster representatives of strongly correlated metabolites and 17 single metabolites were derived by hierarchical clustering. The mutually adjusted associations of the resulting 50 metabolites with cancer risk were examined in penalized conditional logistic regression models adjusted for body mass index, using the data-shared lasso penalty.Results: Out of the 50 studied metabolites, (i) six were inversely associated with the risk of most cancer types: glutamine, butyrylcarnitine, lysophosphatidylcholine a C18:2, and three clusters of phosphatidylcholines (PCs); (ii) three were positively associated with most cancer types: proline, decanoylcarnitine, and one cluster of PCs; and (iii) 10 were specifically associated with particular cancer types, including histidine that was inversely associated with colorectal cancer risk and one cluster of sphingomyelins that was inversely associated with risk of hepatocellular carcinoma and positively with endometrial cancer risk.Conclusions: These results could provide novel insights for the identification of pathways for cancer development, in particular those shared across different cancer types.
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| 2. |
- Crawford, Tim, et al.
(författare)
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Specific functions for Mediator complex subunits from different modules in the transcriptional response of Arabidopsis thaliana to abiotic stress
- 2020
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Ingår i: Scientific Reports. - : Nature Publishing Group. - 2045-2322. ; 10:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Adverse environmental conditions are detrimental to plant growth and development. Acclimation to abiotic stress conditions involves activation of signaling pathways which often results in changes in gene expression via networks of transcription factors (TFs). Mediator is a highly conserved co-regulator complex and an essential component of the transcriptional machinery in eukaryotes. Some Mediator subunits have been implicated in stress-responsive signaling pathways; however, much remains unknown regarding the role of plant Mediator in abiotic stress responses. Here, we use RNA-seq to analyze the transcriptional response of Arabidopsis thaliana to heat, cold and salt stress conditions. We identify a set of common abiotic stress regulons and describe the sequential and combinatorial nature of TFs involved in their transcriptional regulation. Furthermore, we identify stress-specific roles for the Mediator subunits MED9, MED16, MED18 and CDK8, and putative TFs connecting them to different stress signaling pathways. Our data also indicate different modes of action for subunits or modules of Mediator at the same gene loci, including a co-repressor function for MED16 prior to stress. These results illuminate a poorly understood but important player in the transcriptional response of plants to abiotic stress and identify target genes and mechanisms as a prelude to further biochemical characterization.
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| 3. |
- Danielsson, Karin, 1965-, et al.
(författare)
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Autoantibodies and decreased expression of the transcription factor ELF-3 together with increased chemokine pathways support an autoimmune phenotype and altered differentiation in lichen planus located in oral mucosa
- 2013
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Ingår i: Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology. - : Wiley-Blackwell. - 0926-9959 .- 1468-3083. ; 27:11, s. 1410-1416
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background The pathogenesis of oral lichen planus (OLP), a chronic inflammatory disease, is not fully understood. It is known that OLP has autoimmune features, and it is suggested to be an autoimmune disease. ELF-3 is involved in differentiation of keratinocytes and deregulated in different tumours and inflammatory diseases. CXCR-3 and its ligands CXCL-10 and CXCL-11 are increased in autoimmune diseases and linked to Th-1 immune response. Objectives To analyse and compare expression of ELF-3, CXCR-3, CXCL-10 and CXCL-11 in OLP lesions and controls in whole and microdissected epithelium. Methods Tissue biopsies from 20 patients clinically and histologically diagnosed with OLP and 20 healthy controls were studied using whole tissues or microdissected epithelium. By the use of qRT-PCR, mRNA levels of ELF-3, CXCR-3, CXCL-10 and CXCL-11 were studied. Western blot was used for analysis of ELF-3 protein expression. Sera from 19 OLP patients and 20 controls were analysed with ELISA in search for autoantibodies. Results The upregulation of CXCR-3, CXCL-10 and CXCL-11 found in OLP is similar to previous findings showing an autoimmune phenotype in lichen planus (LP) and lichen sclerosus. Decreased expression of the differentiation-related transcription factor ELF-3 was also seen in OLP lesions, and we further demonstrate presence of circulating autoantibodies against the ELF-3 protein in sera from 3 of 19 (16%) LP patients tested. Conclusions On the basis of these findings, we confirm that OLP shows features of an autoimmune disease and suggest deregulated differentiation of keratinocytes to be one of the causes of the disease phenotype.
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| 4. |
- Fahlén, Jessica, 1973-, et al.
(författare)
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MicroRNA-microarray data analysis in the precence of FFPE storage time effects
- 2010
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Background: The standard method for preserving patient samples for diagnostic purposes is fixation in formalin followed by embedding in paraffin (FFPE). The use of FFPE blocks makes it possible to include a large number of patients in the experimental studies since millions of FFPE blocks are stored around the world. However, FFPE storage can cause degradation and modifications of nucleic acids. In order to draw reliable biological conclusions it is therefore important to know what effect FFPE-storage have on the tissues and to have procedures that normalize this effect. In this paper, we study the effect that FFPE-storage has on microRNA-microarray data from tongue-cancer patients and propose a novel procedure for normalizing the bias introduced by FFPE-storage.Results: MicroRNA-microarray data from 21 tongue-cancer patients and 8 control patients were used. The samples were stored in FFPE blocks and had been in storage for up to 11 years. The data contained a large amount of biological relevant variation, yet the largest variation was due to the samples storage times. The storage effect was shown to be significant and some results suggested that it may be causal. Moreover, the microRNAs were unequally affected by storage and this could partially be explained by sequence characteristics. The novel normalization procedure was shown to have a large impact in the analysis ability to identify differentially expressed microRNAs between young and old cancer patients as well as between cancer and control patients. The p-values for the top microRNAs candidates were much lower for the proposed novel normalization compared to a standard normalization procedure which suggested that the novel normalization made the analysis more efficient.Conclusions: MicroRNA-microarray data can be seriously affected by FFPE-storage and the introduced variation cannot be removed by standard normalizations. The proposed normalization removes the bias introduced by FFPE-storage and gives higher sensitivity than the standard normalization.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Matilda, Rentoft, 1981-
(författare)
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The use of formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue and global gene expression profiling for increased understanding of squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Head and neck cancer is the 6th most common malignancy worldwide, with tumours of the tongue being one of the most prevalent sites. Despite advances in surgery and radiotherapy, the five-year survival has not changed during the last decades and remains at approximately 50%. Identification of novel biomarkers for more personalized treatment is important for increasing survival in these patients. One of the most commonly used methods in the search for new biomarkers is microarray analysis. A substantial limitation with this technique is the requirement for fresh frozen samples from which high quality RNA can be extracted. This becomes particularly problematic when attempting to discover differences associated with individual sub-types or rare cancers. Recent developments, including the DASL microarray platform, have provided the possibility of analysing RNA of poorer quality from formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) samples. FFPE is the standard way of preserving tissue from patients and millions of samples are stored around the world. In this thesis we have evaluated the use of FFPE samples and global gene expression profiling for increasing basic knowledge in a subgroup of oral cancer patients with tumours of the tongue. As confirmation of microarray results using qPCR is of outmost importance for conclusive data evaluation, we first aimed at finding a housekeeping gene stably expressed across malignant and non-malignant FFPE oral tissue. TUBA6, which belongs to the tubulin family was detected as being the most stable out of eight possible genes and was thus used for qPCR normalization throughout the following studies. We have performed three separate microarray experiments. Initially only a focused DASL array covering 502 cancer related genes was available and we used it to analyze a smaller cohort of patients and controls (n=36). A similar cohort (n=29) was also analyzed for expression of 836 micoRNAs. In 2009 a whole genome DASL array was launched, covering over 20,000 genes, and all tongue tumour samples available between 1997 and 2010 (n=87) were analysed using this array. Similar to other research groups we observed very high replicate reproducibility using both DASL arrays. When using the microRNA array and the whole genome DASL array an effect of sample quality on the detected expression level of individual genes was noticed. While the expression of some genes severely decreased with a decrease in sample quality others were not changed. This will impair normalization, leading to a residual non-biological variation within the data. Based on our findings we have presented some recommendations for minimizing the effect of sample quality and maximizing the level of biologically relevant information obtained from these experiments, e.g. ensuring that samples in groups to be compared are of the same quality range. For the microRNA data we also introduced an additional normalization step to the standard normalizations. We could show that lists of differentially expressed genes generated when taking these precautions were enriched for genes involved in cancer related processes and contained for tongue carcinoma previously identified changes. A number of differentially expressed genes, novel for tongue carcinoma, were also confirmed in high quality fresh frozen samples, including BCL2A1 (apoptosis), CXCL10 (immune response), SLC2A6 (energy transport) and miR-424 (angiogenesis). In conclusion microarrays can be used to analyze FFPE samples but should be performed with care. Standard normalization methods will not remove the variation introduced by samples being of different quality, leading to spurious results. Taking a few precautions, however, led to the identification of differentially expressed genes relevant in tumour development and maintenance. The recommendations we make can facilitate design of future studies using FFPE samples. The genes we identified as being differentially expressed in tumour tissue now need to be further evaluated for their potential as biomarkers in tongue carcinoma.
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| 7. |
- Obi, Ikenna, et al.
(författare)
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Stabilization of G-quadruplex DNA structures in Schizosaccharomyces pombe causes single-strand DNA lesions and impedes DNA replication
- 2020
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Ingår i: Nucleic Acids Research. - : Oxford University Press. - 0305-1048 .- 1362-4962. ; 48:19, s. 10998-11015
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- G-quadruplex (G4) structures are stable noncanonical DNA structures that are implicated in the regulation of many cellular pathways. We show here that the G4-stabilizing compound PhenDC3 causes growth defects in Schizosaccharomyces pombe cells, especially during S-phase in synchronized cultures. By visualizing individual DNA molecules, we observed shorter DNA fragments of newly replicated DNA in the PhenDC3-treated cells, suggesting that PhenDC3 impedes replication fork progression. Furthermore, a novel single DNA molecule damage assay revealed increased single-strand DNA lesions in the PhenDC3-treated cells. Moreover, chromatin immunoprecipitation showed enrichment of the leading-strand DNA polymerase at sites of predicted G4 structures, suggesting that these structures impede DNA replication. We tested a subset of these sites and showed that they form G4 structures, that they stall DNA synthesis in vitro and that they can be resolved by the breast cancerassociated Pif1 family helicases. Our results thus suggest that G4 structures occur in S. pombe and that stabilized/unresolved G4 structures are obstacles for the replication machinery. The increased levels of DNA damage might further highlight the association of the human Pif1 helicase with familial breast cancer and the onset of other human diseases connected to unresolved G4 structures.
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| 8. |
- Rentoft, Matilda, et al.
(författare)
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A geographically matched control population efficiently limits the number of candidate disease-causing variants in an unbiased whole-genome analysis
- 2019
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Ingår i: PLoS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203 .- 1932-6203. ; 14:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Whole-genome sequencing is a promising approach for human autosomal dominant disease studies. However, the vast number of genetic variants observed by this method constitutes a challenge when trying to identify the causal variants. This is often handled by restricting disease studies to the most damaging variants, e. g. those found in coding regions, and overlooking the remaining genetic variation. Such a biased approach explains in part why the genetic causes of many families with dominantly inherited diseases, in spite of being included in whole-genome sequencing studies, are left unsolved today. Here we explore the use of a geographically matched control population to minimize the number of candidate disease-causing variants without excluding variants based on assumptions on genomic position or functional predictions. To exemplify the benefit of the geographically matched control population we apply a typical disease variant filtering strategy in a family with an autosomal dominant form of colorectal cancer. With the use of the geographically matched control population we end up with 26 candidate variants genome wide. This is in contrast to the tens of thousands of candidates left when only making use of available public variant datasets. The effect of the local control population is dual, it (1) reduces the total number of candidate variants shared between affected individuals, and more importantly (2) increases the rate by which the number of candidate variants are reduced as additional affected family members are included in the filtering strategy. We demonstrate that the application of a geographically matched control population effectively limits the number of candidate disease-causing variants and may provide the means by which variants suitable for functional studies are identified genome wide.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Rentoft, Matilda, et al.
(författare)
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Enhancer requirement for histone methylation linked with gene activation
- 2008
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Ingår i: The FEBS Journal. - Malden : Wiley-Blackwell. - 1742-464X .- 1742-4658. ; 275:23, s. 5994-6001
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Enhancers cause a high level of transcription and activation of chromatin structure at target genes. Hyperacetylation of histones H3 and H4, a mark of active chromatin, is established broadly across target loci by enhancers that function over long distances. In the present study, we studied the role of an enhancer in methylation of various lysine residues on H3 by comparing a model gene locus having an active enhancer with one in which the enhancer has been inactivated within the context of minichromosomes. The intact enhancer affected histone methylation at K4, K9 and K36 in distinct ways depending on the methylation level and the location in the locus. All three lysine residues were highly tri-methylated in the coding region of the gene linked to the active enhancer but not the inactive enhancer. However di-methylation of K9 and K36 was not affected by the enhancer. The enhancer region itself was marked by mono-methylation at K4 and K9, distinguishing it from the methyl marks in the gene coding region. These results indicate that an enhancer has roles in establishing active histone methylation patterns linked with gene transcription rather than removing methylation linked with gene inactivation.
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