Towards resolution of the intron retention paradox in breast cancer

Shah, Jaynish S., Milevskiy, Michael J.G., Petrova, Veronika, Au, Amy Y.M., Wong, Justin J.L., Visvader, Jane E., Schmitz, Ulf, and Rasko, John E.J. (2022) Towards resolution of the intron retention paradox in breast cancer. Breast Cancer Research, 24. 100.

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Abstract

Background: After many years of neglect in the field of alternative splicing, the importance of intron retention (IR) in cancer has come into focus following landmark discoveries of aberrant IR patterns in cancer. Many solid and liquid tumours are associated with drastic increases in IR, and such patterns have been pursued as both biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Paradoxically, breast cancer (BrCa) is the only tumour type in which IR is reduced compared to adjacent normal breast tissue.

Methods: In this study, we have conducted a pan-cancer analysis of IR with emphasis on BrCa and its subtypes. We explored mechanisms that could cause aberrant and pathological IR and clarified why normal breast tissue has unusually high IR.

Results: Strikingly, we found that aberrantly decreasing IR in BrCa can be largely attributed to normal breast tissue having the highest occurrence of IR events compared to other healthy tissues. Our analyses suggest that low numbers of IR events in breast tumours are associated with poor prognosis, particularly in the luminal B subtype. Interestingly, we found that IR frequencies negatively correlate with cell proliferation in BrCa cells, i.e. rapidly dividing tumour cells have the lowest number of IR events. Aberrant RNA-binding protein expression and changes in tissue composition are among the causes of aberrantly decreasing IR in BrCa.

Conclusions: Our results suggest that IR should be considered for therapeutic manipulation in BrCa patients with aberrantly low IR levels and that further work is needed to understand the cause and impact of high IR in other tumour types.

Item ID: 77152
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 1465-542X
Copyright Information: © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Funders: National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC)
Projects and Grants: NHMRC #1177305, NHMRC #196405, NHMRC #507776, NHMRC #1128748
Date Deposited: 04 Jan 2023 23:30
FoR Codes: 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3102 Bioinformatics and computational biology > 310204 Genomics and transcriptomics @ 50%
32 BIOMEDICAL AND CLINICAL SCIENCES > 3211 Oncology and carcinogenesis > 321101 Cancer cell biology @ 50%
SEO Codes: 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280103 Expanding knowledge in the biomedical and clinical sciences @ 100%
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