ON THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN ANEUPLOIDY IN CANCER AND THE FUNCTIONAL LINKAGE BETWEEN CHROMOSOMES

Liat Ein Dor ¹ Michal Ozery-Flato ¹ Annelyse Thevenin ² Ron Shamir ³

¹Machine Learning and Data Mining Group, IBM Haifa Research Lab, Haifa
²Genome Informatics, Faculty of Technology and Institute for Bioinformatics, Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec), Bielefeld University,, Bielefeld
³Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv

In a previous work we showed that aneuploidy evolves in two distinct paths dominated by either chromosome gains or chromosome losses (Ozery-Flato et al. Genome Biology 2011). We hypothesized that this pattern results from a tendency of the aneuploid cancer cells to balance altered protein ratios in functional units whose genes reside in several chromosomes. Here we provide additional support for this hypothesis by presenting an association between the chromosomes’ tendency to be co-gained in solid tumors and the strength of their functional linkage, as evaluated from protein interaction data. The pairs of co-gained chromosomes in aneuploidy tend to share more protein interactions. This novel computational analysis provides an additional clue towards explaining the enigma of aneuploidy in cancer.