Back

Genomic events shaping epithelial-to-mesenchymal trajectories in cancer

Malagoli Tagliazucchi, G.; Secrier, M.

2021-07-25 cancer biology
10.1101/2021.07.23.453584 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a key cellular process underlying cancer progression, with multiple intermediate states whose molecular hallmarks remain poorly characterized. To fill this gap, we explored EMT trajectories in 7,180 tumours of epithelial origin and identified three macro-states with prognostic and therapeutic value, attributable to epithelial, hybrid E/M and mesenchymal phenotypes. We show that the hybrid state is remarkably stable and linked with increased aneuploidy and APOBEC mutagenesis. We further employed spatial transcriptomics and single cell datasets to show that local effects impact EMT transformation through the establishment of distinct interaction patterns with cytotoxic, NK cells and fibroblasts in the tumour microenvironment. Additionally, we provide an extensive catalogue of genomic events underlying distinct evolutionary constraints on EMT transformation. This study sheds light on the aetiology of distinct stages along the EMT trajectory, and highlights broader genomic and environmental hallmarks shaping the mesenchymal transformation of primary tumours.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.