Assessing the Significance of Conserved Genomic Aberrations Using High Resolution Genomic Microarrays

Genomic aberrations recurrent in a particular cancer type can be important prognostic markers for tumor progression. Typically in early tumorigenesis, cells incur a breakdown of the DNA replication machinery that results in an accumulation of genomic aberrations in the form of duplications, deletions, translocations, and other genomic alterations. Microarray methods allow for finer mapping of these aberrations than has previously been possible; however, data processing and analysis methods have not taken full advantage of this higher resolution. Attention has primarily been given to analysis on the single sample level, where multiple adjacent probes are necessarily used as replicates for the local region containing their target sequences. However, regions of concordant aberration can be short enough to be detected by only one, or very few, array elements. We describe a method called Multiple Sample Analysis for assessing the significance of concordant genomic aberrations across multiple experiments that does not require a-priori definition of aberration calls for each sample. If there are multiple samples, representing a class, then by exploiting the replication across samples our method can detect concordant aberrations at much higher resolution than can be derived from current single sample approaches. Additionally, this method provides a meaningful approach to addressing population-based questions such as determining important regions for a cancer subtype of interest or determining regions of copy number variation in a population. Multiple Sample Analysis also provides single sample aberration calls in the locations of significant concordance, producing high resolution calls per sample, in concordant regions. The approach is demonstrated on a dataset representing a challenging but important resource: breast tumors that have been formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded, archived, and subsequently UV-laser capture microdissected and hybridized to two-channel BAC arrays using an amplification protocol. We demonstrate the accurate detection on simulated data, and on real datasets involving known regions of aberration within subtypes of breast cancer at a resolution consistent with that of the array. Similarly, we apply our method to previously published datasets, including a 250K SNP array, and verify known results as well as detect novel regions of concordant aberration. The algorithm has been fully implemented and tested and is freely available as a Java application at http://www.cbil.upenn.edu/MSA.: Cancer is a genetic disease caused by genomic mutations that confer an increased ability to proliferate and survive in a specific environment. It is now known that many regions of genomic DNA are deleted or amplified in specific cancer types. These aberrations are believed to occur randomly in the genome. If these aberrations overlap more than would be expected by chance across individual occurrences of the cancer this suggests a selective pressure on this aberration. These conserved aberrations likely represent regions that are important for the development, progression, and survival of a specific cancer type in its environment. We present a method for identifying these conserved aberrations within a class of samples. The applications for this method include accurate high resolution mapping of aberrations characteristic of cancer subtypes as well as other genetic diseases and determination of conserved copy number variations in the population. With the use of high resolution microarray methods we have profiled different tumor types. We have been able to create high resolution profiles of conserved aberrations in specific cancer types. These conserved aberrations are prime targets for cancer therapies and many of these regions have already been used to develop effective cancer therapeutics.