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- Charitou, Theodosia, et al.
(författare)
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Transcriptional and metabolic rewiring of colorectal cancer cells expressing the oncogenic KRAS(G13D) mutation
- 2019
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Ingår i: British Journal of Cancer. - : NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP. - 0007-0920 .- 1532-1827. ; 121:1, s. 37-50
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BACKGROUND: Activating mutations in KRAS frequently occur in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, leading to resistance to EGFRtargeted therapies. METHODS: To better understand the cellular reprogramming which occurs in mutant KRAS cells, we have undertaken a systems-level analysis of four CRC cell lines which express either wild type (wt) KRAS or the oncogenic KRAS(G13D) allele (mtKRAS). RESULTS: RNAseq revealed that genes involved in ribosome biogenesis, mRNA translation and metabolism were significantly upregulated in mtKRAS cells. Consistent with the transcriptional data, protein synthesis and cell proliferation were significantly higher in the mtKRAS cells. Targeted metabolomics analysis also confirmed the metabolic reprogramming in mtKRAS cells. Interestingly, mtKRAS cells were highly transcriptionally responsive to EGFR activation by TGF alpha stimulation, which was associated with an unexpected downregulation of genes involved in a range of anabolic processes. While TGF alpha treatment strongly activated protein synthesis in wtKRAS cells, protein synthesis was not activated above basal levels in the TGF alpha-treated mtKRAS cells. This was likely due to the defective activation of the mTORC1 and other pathways by TGF alpha in mtKRAS cells, which was associated with impaired activation of PKB signalling and a transient induction of AMPK signalling. CONCLUSIONS: We have found that mtKRAS cells are substantially rewired at the transcriptional, translational and metabolic levels and that this rewiring may reveal new vulnerabilities in oncogenic KRAS CRC cells that could be exploited in future.
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| 2. |
- Fasterius, Erik, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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Single-cell RNA-seq variant analysis for exploration of genetic heterogeneity in cancer
- 2019
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Ingår i: Scientific Reports. - : NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP. - 2045-2322. ; 9
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Inter-and intra-tumour heterogeneity is caused by genetic and non-genetic factors, leading to severe clinical implications. High-throughput sequencing technologies provide unprecedented tools to analyse DNA and RNA in single cells and explore both genetic heterogeneity and phenotypic variation between cells in tissues and tumours. Simultaneous analysis of both DNA and RNA in the same cell is, however, still in its infancy. We have thus developed a method to extract and analyse information regarding genetic heterogeneity that affects cellular biology from single-cell RNA-seq data. The method enables both comparisons and clustering of cells based on genetic variation in single nucleotide variants, revealing cellular subpopulations corroborated by gene expression-based methods. Furthermore, the results show that lymph node metastases have lower levels of genetic heterogeneity compared to their original tumours with respect to variants affecting protein function. The analysis also revealed three previously unknown variants common across cancer cells in glioblastoma patients. These results demonstrate the power and versatility of scRNA-seq variant analysis and highlight it as a useful complement to already existing methods, enabling simultaneous investigations of both gene expression and genetic variation.
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