Direct transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation in breast cancer

The disordered transcriptomes of cancer encompass direct effects of somatic mutation on transcription; co-ordinated secondary alterations in transcriptional pathways; and increased transcriptional noise. To catalogue the rules governing how somatic mutation Overall, 59% of 6980 exonic substitutions were expressed. Compared to other classes, nonsense mutations showed lower expression levels than expected with patterns characteristic of nonsense-mediated decay. 14% of 4234 genomic rearrangements caused transcriptional abnormalities, including exon skips, exon reusage, fusion transcripts and premature poly-adenylation. We found productive, stable transcription from sense-to-antisense gene fusions and gene-to-intergenic rearrangements, suggesting that these mutation classes may drive more transcriptional disruption than previously suspected. Systematic integration of transcriptome with genome data therefore reveals the rules by which transcriptional machinery interprets somatic mutation.

• 16/08/2016
• 59 samples
• DAC: EGAC00001000000
• Technologies: Illumina Genome Analyzer II, Illumina HiSeq 2000