The U.S. Cancer Genome Atlas compiles genetic information on tumour cells from several thousand cancer patients, the ETH explained in a press release. A team of scientists at ETH led by Gunnar Rätsch, Professor of Biomedical Informatics at ETH Zurich, have evaluated this Atlas in respect of cancer-specific molecular changes.
The ETH researchers focused on processes that occur in the splicing of RNA molecules, which are responsible for transcribing the cell’s DNA. In this, specialised enzymes cut out entire sections from the RNA molecule and join the sequences on either side together. The remaining RNA molecule delivers the blueprint for the protein-making machinery in cells. An RNA molecule can be spliced in a range of different ways, referred to as alternative splicing.
In the research, scientists found several tens of thousands of variants for alternative splicing that crop up over and over in many cancer patients. They also showed that alternative splicing occurred much more frequently in tumour tissues than in healthy tissue.
“Cancer leads to molecular and functional changes in cells. You could say that in cancer cells, there’s lots of sand in the gears,” comments André Kahles, a post-doctoral researcher in Rätsch’s group. “At the molecular level the changes come not only in the form of individual DNA mutations, which we’ve known about for a long time, but also to a great extent in the form of different kinds of RNA splicing, as we were able to show in our comprehensive analysis.” The variants of alternative splicing discovered by the researchers could serve as markers for the development of specific immunotherapy medications linked to the respective protein changes.
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