Widespread Alternative Splicing Changes in Metastatic Breast Cancer Cells

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Abstract
Aberrant alternative splicing (AS) is a hallmark of cancer and a potential target for novel anti-cancer therapeutics. Breast cancer-associated AS events are known to be linked to disease progression, metastasis, and survival of breast cancer patients. To identify altered AS programs occurring in metastatic breast cancer, we perform a global analysis of AS events by using RNA-mediated oligonucleotide annealing, selection, and ligation coupled with next-generation sequencing (RASL-seq). We demonstrate that, relative to low-metastatic, high-metastatic breast cancer cells show different AS choices in genes related to cancer progression. Supporting a global reshape of cancer-related splicing profiles in metastatic breast cancer we found an enrichment of RNA-binding motifs recognized by several splicing regulators, which have aberrant expression levels or activity during breast cancer progression, including SRSF1. Among SRSF1-regulated targets we found DCUN1D5, a gene for which skipping of exon 4 in its pre-mRNA introduces a premature termination codon (PTC), thus generating an unstable transcript degraded by nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). Significantly, distinct breast cancer subtypes show different DCUN1D5 isoform ratios with metastatic breast cancer expressing the highest level of the NMD-insensitive DCUN1D5 mRNA, thus showing high DCUN1D5 expression levels, which are ultimately associated with poor overall and relapse-free survival in breast cancer patients. Collectively, our results reveal global AS features of metastatic breast tumors, which open new possibilities for the treatment of these aggressive tumor types.
Funding Information
  • Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea (2017R1A2B2005896, 2020R1A2C2004682)
  • inistry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea (2019R1I1A1A01057372)
  • GIST Research Institute (GRI) IIBR" grant funded by the GIST (2020)
  • Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sul Cancro (IG 2018 Id.21966)
  • AIRC fellowship (Davide Pradella)

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