SUMMARY A causal role of gene amplification in tumorigenesis is well-known, while amplification of DNA regulatory elements as an oncogenic driver remains unclear. In this study, we integrated next-generation sequencing approaches to map distant estrogen response elements (DEREs) that remotely control transcription of target genes through chromatin proximity. Two densely mapped DERE regions located on chromosomes 17q23 and 20q13 were frequently amplified in ERα-positive luminal breast cancer. These aberrantly amplified DEREs deregulated target gene expression potentially linked to cancer development and tamoxifen resistance. Progressive accumulation of DERE copies was observed in normal breast progenitor cells chronically exposed to estrogenic chemicals. These findings may extend to other DNA regulatory elements, the amplification of which can profoundly alter target transcriptome during tumorigenesis.

BackgroundGlobal profiling of in vivo protein-DNA interactions using ChIP-based technologies has evolved rapidly in recent years. Although many genome-wide studies have identified thousands of ERα binding sites and have revealed the associated transcription factor (TF) partners, such as AP1, FOXA1 and CEBP, little is known about ERα associated hierarchical transcriptional regulatory networks.ResultsIn this study, we applied computational approaches to analyze three public available ChIP-based datasets: ChIP-seq, ChIP-PET and ChIP-chip, and to investigate the hierarchical regulatory network for ERα and ERα partner TFs regulation in estrogen-dependent breast cancer MCF7 cells. 16 common TFs and two common new TF partners (RORA and PITX2) were found among ChIP-seq, ChIP-chip and ChIP-PET datasets. The regulatory networks were constructed by scanning the ChIP-peak region with TF specific position weight matrix (PWM). A permutation test was performed to test the reliability of each connection of the network. We then used DREM software to perform gene ontology function analysis on the common genes. We found that FOS, PITX2, RORA and FOXA1 were involved in the up-regulated genes.We also conducted the ERα and Pol-II ChIP-seq experiments in tamoxifen resistance MCF7 cells (denoted as MCF7-T in this study) and compared the difference between MCF7 and MCF7-T cells. The result showed very little overlap between these two cells in terms of targeted genes (21.2% of common genes) and targeted TFs (25% of common TFs). The significant dissimilarity may indicate totally different transcriptional regulatory mechanisms between these two cancer cells.ConclusionsOur study uncovers new estrogen-mediated regulatory networks by mining three ChIP-based data in MCF7 cells and ChIP-seq data in MCF7-T cells. We compared the different ChIP-based technologies as well as different breast cancer cells. Our computational analytical approach may guide biologists to further study the underlying mechanisms in breast cancer cells or other human diseases.

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<p>Suppl Information Table S1. Clinical characteristics of COH-SC1 and COH-SC31 PDXs</p>