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CLSSS: The Landscape of Somatic Genome Rearrangements in Human Cancers
September 27, 2018 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
FreeJoin us for this month’s meeting of the Computational Life Sciences Seminar Series.
Title: The Landscape of Somatic Genome Rearrangements in Human Cancers
Speaker: Lixing Yang, PhD, Assistant Professor, Ben May Department for Cancer Research
Date: Thursday, September 27, 2018
Time: 3:00-4:00pm
Location: KCBD 1103 (first floor auditorium)
High-throughput sequencing technologies make identification of somatic genome rearrangements in cancer patients possible although many challenges remain. We developed a novel algorithm that can not only detect these events in high confidence, but also infer their underlying mechanisms. By analyzing over 2,000 whole-genome sequenced cancer patients across 40 tumor types, we found tremendous diversity in terms of frequencies and types of somatic rearrangements among patients and across tumor types. The somatic events depend more on non-homologous based mechanisms compared to germline rearrangements. We identified many novel cancer-driving gene fusions and validated several by in vitro and in vivo assays. Furthermore, we found that ~30% of the patients have massively rearranged chromosomes, many of which are associated with up-regulation of oncogenes.
The Center for Research Informatics in conjunction with the Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics launched the Computational Life Sciences Seminar Series (CLSSS) in October 2017.
