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Chapter 2 - University of British Columbia

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mutation, KRAS and BRAF, the overall trend is consistent with what is observed at these two<br />

loci (Figure 4.6a). An example <strong>of</strong> UPD at KRAS in NCI-H2030 and BRAF in A427 are<br />

illustrated in Figure 4.6b.<br />

For this analysis, cancer cell lines were utilized as the samples represent a more homogeneous<br />

population <strong>of</strong> cells. In contrast, clinical tumors, even after microdissection, still may contain<br />

small amounts <strong>of</strong> contaminating normal cells. As such, determining if a mutation is<br />

homozygous in clinical lung tumors is challenging. With available KRAS mutation data, we<br />

assessed the frequency <strong>of</strong> gain, loss and UPD in KRAS mutant tumors and observe a similar<br />

distribution pattern observed in the cell lines (Figure 4.6c)<br />

4.3.5 Identification <strong>of</strong> novel candidate oncogenes using focal regions <strong>of</strong> UPD<br />

Selecting the more focal regions <strong>of</strong> UPD within the set <strong>of</strong> 153 regions, we identified 35 <strong>of</strong> the<br />

regions which contained three or less RefSeq annotated genes. In total, 64 RefSeq genes were<br />

identified across all 35 regions (Table 4.7) and amongst these genes was E2F3 (Figure 4.7a).<br />

Examining paired gene expression for a subset <strong>of</strong> the 46 tumor/normal pairs, it was found that<br />

10/16 pairs showed overexpression <strong>of</strong> E2F3 (Figure 4.7b). E2F3 has previously shown to be<br />

overexpressed in lung cancer and also shown to have a role in other cancer types [30, 31].<br />

4.4 Discussion<br />

We have shown the unexpected and wide prevalence <strong>of</strong> UPD in the lung adenocarcinoma<br />

genome and have also observed a large number <strong>of</strong> both known and novel oncogenes harbored<br />

in these regions <strong>of</strong> frequent UPD. While there have been previous studies utilizing SNP arrays<br />

on lung adenocarcinoma tumors [26, 30], there are likely a number <strong>of</strong> reasons why these<br />

frequent regions were likely missed. First, the tumors utilized in this study were microdissected<br />

to ensure a high proportion <strong>of</strong> tumor cells (≥ 70% was required) were analyzed. This is<br />

important as previous studies have shown the impact <strong>of</strong> tissue heterogeneity and the ability to<br />

detect alterations [32, 33]. Secondly, for every tumor used, matched non-malignant tissue was<br />

85

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