报告人：  Lixing Yang, Ph.D.

                 Research Fellow

                 Department of Biomedical Informatics

                 Harvard Medical School, USA 

主持人：  张勇教授

时间：      2016年4月29日周五上午10:00-11:00

地点：      医学大楼1102会议室

Abstract

    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 800 whole-genome sequenced cancer patients across 19 tumor types, we found tremendous diversity in terms 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 ~4% of the patients have massively rearranged chromosomes, many of which are associated with up-regulation of oncogenes.

Publications

Davis CF*, Ricketts CJ*, Wang M*, Yang L*, et al. The somatic genomic landscape of chromophobe renal cell carcinoma.Cancer Cell 2014; 26:319-30

Yang L, et al. Diverse mechanisms of somatic structural variations in human cancer genomes.Cell 2013; 153:919-29.

Yang L, et al. Structure-based discovery and description of plant and animal Helitrons.ProcNatlAcadSciU S A 2009;106:12832-7.