Efficient Representations of Tumor Diversity with Paired DNA-RNA Aberrations
Authors: Ke Qian , Dinalankara Wikum , Younes Laurent , Geman Donald , Marchionni Luigi 
Published: April 2020

Cancer cells display massive dysregulation of key regulatory pathways due to now well-catalogued mutations and other DNA-related aberrations. Moreover, enormous heterogeneity has been commonly observed in the identity, frequency and location of these aberrations across individuals with the same cancer type or subtype, and this variation naturally propagates to the transcriptome, resulting in myriad types of dysregulated gene expression programs. Many have argued that a more integrative and quantitative analysis of heterogeneity of DNA and RNA molecular profiles may be necessary for designing more systematic explorations of alternative therapies and improving predictive accuracy.

We introduce a representation of multi-omicsprofiles which is sufficiently rich to account for observed heterogeneity and support the construction of quantitative, integrated, metrics of variation. Starting from the network of interactions existing in Reactome, we build a library of “paired DNA-RNA aberrations” that represent prototypical and recurrent patterns of dysregulation in cancer; each two-gene “Source-Target Pair” (STP) consists of a “source” regulatory gene and a “target” gene whose expression is plausibly “controlled” by the source gene. The STP is then “aberrant” in a joint DNA-RNA profile if the source gene is DNA-aberrant (e.g., mutated, deleted, or duplicated), and the downstream target gene is “RNA-aberrant”, meaning its expression level is outside the normal, baseline range. WithMSTPs, each sample profile has exactly one of the 2Mpossible configurations.

We concentrate on subsets of STPs, and the corresponding reduced configurations, by selecting tissue-dependent minimal coverings, defined as the smallest family of STPs with the property that every sample in the considered population displays at least one aberrant STP within that family. These minimal coverings can be computed with integer programming. Given such a covering, a natural measure of cross-sample diversity is the extent to which the particular aberrant STPs composing a covering vary from sample to sample; this variability is captured by the entropy of the distribution over configurations.

We apply this program to data from TCGA for six distinct tumor types (breast, prostate, lung, colon, liver, and kidney cancer). This enables an efficient simplification of the complex landscape observed in cancer populations, resulting in the identification of novel signatures of molecular alterations which are not detected with frequency-based criteria. Estimates of cancer heterogeneity across tumor phenotypes reveals a stable pattern: entropy increases with disease severity. This framework is then well-suited to accommodate the expanding complexity of cancer genomes and epigenomes emerging from large consortia projects.

Author Summary

A large variety of genomic and transcriptomic aberrations are observed in cancer cells, and their identity, location, and frequency can be highly indicative of the particular subtype or molecular phenotype, and thereby inform treatment options. However, elucidating this association between sets of aberrations and subtypes of cancer is severely impeded by considerable diversity in the set of aberrations across samples from the same population. Most attempts at analyzing tumor heterogeneity have dealt with either the genome or transcriptome in isolation. Here we present a novel, multi-omics approach for quantifying heterogeneity by determining a small set of paired DNA-RNA aberrations that incorporates potential downstream effects on gene expression. We apply integer programming to identify a small set of paired aberrations such that at least one among them is present in every sample of a given cancer population. The resulting “coverings” are analyzed for six cancer cohorts from the Cancer Genome Atlas, and facilitate introducing an information-theoretic measure of heterogeneity. Our results identify many known facets of tumorigenesis as well as suggest potential novel genes and interactions of interest.

Data Availability Statement

RNA-Seq data, somatic mutation data and copy number data for The Cancer Genome Atlas were obtained through the Xena Cancer Genome Browser database (https://xenabrowser.net) from individual cancer type cohorts. Computational functionality for the optimization procedure is provided athttps://github.com/wikum/lpcoverand the code for the analysis in the manuscript is provided athttps://github.com/wikum/CoveringAnalysis. Processed data in the form of TAB delimited files, and selected tissue-level coverings (in excel format) are provided as additional supplementary material and are also available from the Marchionni laboratory website (http://marchionnilab.org/signatures.html)