We would like to direct you to the service provider for the Finnish FEGA Node, which is CSC – IT Center for Science (https://research.csc.fi/-/fega). It's important to note that this is not a genuine DAC and does not serve as the data controller. To obtain access to data stored in FI-FEGA, it is essential to utilize the local access management system SD Apply. Please be aware that applications submitted through the EGA DAC portal will not be processed. For a seamless experience, we kindly request you to refer to the policy of your selected dataset and submit your access application through SD Apply (https://sd-apply.csc.fi/). Your cooperation is highly appreciated.
This Data Access Committee (DAC) evaluates access requests for RNA-seq data generated from: - Membranes from proliferative vitreoretinal diseases, including proliferative vitreoretinopathy and epiretinal membranes. - Retinal pigment epithelial cells isolated from healthy ocular globes obtained from deceased donors. Collection and analysis of these residual human materials were conducted with the approval of the ULB-Erasme Ethical Committee (P2019/066 A2022/136) and of the Eye Bank (CHU Liège), with no need for informed consent in compliance with Belgian law. All data are pseudonymised, and access is restricted to qualified researchers whose proposed use of the data is consistent with the applicable ethical approval and legal requirements, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
While cell-free DNA (cfDNA) in liquid biopsies is widely being used and investigated, free circulating RNA (extracellular RNA, exRNA) has the potential to improve therapy response monitoring and cancer detection due to its dynamic nature. A fundamental open question hampering the initiation of large-scale liquid biopsy collections for tumour exRNA analysis is that it remains unclear in which blood subcompartment tumour-derived exRNAs primarily reside. We set out to develop a host-xenograft deconvolution framework, exRNAxeno, with cDNA mapping strategies to either a combined human-mouse reference genome or both species genomes in parallel, that can be applied to exRNA sequencing data from liquid biopsies of human xenograft mouse models, enabling to distinguish (human) tumoural RNA from (murine) host RNA, and as such to specifically analyse tumour-derived exRNA. Subsequently, the preferred exRNAxeno combination pipeline was applied to total exRNA sequencing data from blood platelets and three plasma fractions from a breast cancer patient-derived and neuroblastoma cell line-derived xenograft mouse model. We show that tumoural exRNA concentrations are not determined by plasma platelet levels, while host exRNA concentrations increase with platelet content. Furthermore, a large variability in exRNA levels and gene content across individual mice is observed. In general, the tumoural gene detectability in plasma is correlated with the RNA expression levels in the tumour tissue or cancer cell line. Our results unravel new aspects of tumour-derived exRNA biology in xenograft mouse models.