Commentary on Transcriptome sequencing to detect gene fusions in cancer: Maher CA, Kumar-Sinha C, Cao X, Kalyana-Sundaram S, Han B, Jing X, Sam L, Barrette T, Palanisamy N, Chinnaiyan AM, Michigan Center for Translational Pathology, Ann Arbor, MI

Posted by rob on June 30, 2009 under Uncategorized | Comments are off for this article

Recurrent gene fusions, typically associated with hematological malignancies and rare bone and soft-tissue tumors, have recently been described in common solid tumors. Here we use an integrative analysis of high-throughput long- and short-read transcriptome sequencing of cancer cells to discover novel gene fusions. As a proof of concept, we successfully used integrative transcriptome sequencing to “re-discover” the BCR-ABL1 (ref. 10) gene fusion in a chronic myelogenous leukemia cell line and the TMPRSS2-ERG gene fusion in a prostate cancer cell line and tissues. Additionally, we nominated, and experimentally validated, novel gene fusions resulting in chimaeras transcripts in cancer cell lines and tumors. Taken together, this study establishes a robust pipeline for the discovery of nov…