Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-7-2017

Comments

This article has been peer reviewed. It is the author’s final published version in Nucleic Acids Research

Volume 45, Issue 6, April 2017, Pages 2973-2985.

The published version is available at DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkx082. Copyright © Telonis et al.

Abstract

Isoforms of human miRNAs (isomiRs) are constitutively expressed with tissue- and disease-subtype-dependencies. We studied 10 271 tumor datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to evaluate whether isomiRs can distinguish amongst 32 TCGA cancers. Unlike previous approaches, we built a classifier that relied solely on 'binarized' isomiR profiles: each isomiR is simply labeled as 'present' or 'absent'. The resulting classifier successfully labeled tumor datasets with an average sensitivity of 90% and a false discovery rate (FDR) of 3%, surpassing the performance of expression-based classification. The classifier maintained its power even after a 15× reduction in the number of isomiRs that were used for training. Notably, the classifier could correctly predict the cancer type in non-TCGA datasets from diverse platforms. Our analysis revealed that the most discriminatory isomiRs happen to also be differentially expressed between normal tissue and cancer. Even so, we find that these highly discriminating isomiRs have not been attracting the most research attention in the literature. Given their ability to successfully classify datasets from 32 cancers, isomiRs and our resulting 'Pan-cancer Atlas' of isomiR expression could serve as a suitable framework to explore novel cancer biomarkers.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

PubMed ID

28206648

Download

Share

COinS