Abstract 3946: Genome-wide characterization of hypoxic breast cancer transcriptome

Hypoxia is a common feature of most solid tumors and is associated with poor prognosis in breast cancer. In the current study, we investigated the hypoxia transcription landscape of an ER positive breast cancer cell line [MCF7] using high throughput strand-specific total RNA sequencing (tssRNA-seq). MCF7 cells were grown under hypoxia and normoxia (24 hours, 1% O2), and we found about 7.3% of annotated genome got significantly differential expressed in hypoxic stress, which includes 79% (1293) up regulated and 21% (344) down regulated transcripts (P value of 1.5). Analysis revealed deregulation of a range of non coding transcripts including piwiRNA (0.36%), miRNA (0.098%), sn/snoRNA (0.028%), tRNA (4.5%), lncRNA (6.5%) under hypoxia (P value of 1.5). Many non-poly A transcripts and natural anti-sense transcripts (n=71) were detected and differently expressed in hypoxia. We characterized two significant up regulated natural anti-sense transcripts in hypoxia and found that these transcripts are long (>200bp), lack of protein coding frames, localized in nucleus and found highly expressed (range fold >5-15) in different hypoxic breast cancer cell lines. To define which hypoxic altered transcripts are dependent on, hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF), we suppressed HIF-alpha subunits in hypoxic MFC-7 cells using short interfering RNA and subjected them to mRNA-seq. Results revealed that HIF-1, HIF-2 and combined HIF-1/2 knockdown resulted in significant down-regulation of 179, 84 and 149 transcripts, respectively, which were up regulated in hypoxic MCF-7 cells. Despite detection of previously reported HIF dependent transcripts, we detected a substantial number of HIF dependent transcripts (n=64) that were not reported before as hypoxia regulated genes. To our understanding, this is first study to show hypoxia dependent natural anti-sense transcripts and genome-wide HIF dependent transcripts analysis at single base pair resolution in hypoxic tumors. These finding will open new avenues in our efforts to understand the hypoxia induced transcriptional response. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2012 Mar 31-Apr 4; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2012;72(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 3946. doi:1538-7445.AM2012-3946