Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 8, 2026

Integration of Wet and Dry Bench Processes Optimizes Targeted Next-generation Sequencing of Low-quality and Low-quantity Tumor Biopsies
Published on: April 11, 2016
Widespread Post-transcriptional Attenuation of Genomic Copy-Number Variation in Cancer
Emanuel Gonçalves1, Athanassios Fragoulis2, Luz Garcia-Alonso1
1European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
Abstract:
Copy-number variations (CNVs) are ubiquitous in cancer and often act as driver events, but the effects of CNVs on the proteome of tumors are poorly understood. Here, we analyze recently published genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics datasets made available by CPTAC and TCGA consortia on 282 breast, ovarian, and colorectal tumor samples to investigate the impact of CNVs in the proteomes of these cells. We found that CNVs are buffered by post-transcriptional regulation in 23%-33% of proteins that are significantly enriched in protein complex members. Our analyses show that complex subunits are highly co-regulated, and some act as rate-limiting steps of complex assembly, as their depletion induces decreased abundance of other complex members. We identified 48 such rate-limiting interactions and experimentally confirmed our predictions on the interactions of AP3B1 with AP3M1 and GTF2E2 with GTF2E1. This study highlights the importance of post-transcriptional mechanisms in cancer that allow cells to cope with their altered genomes.
Related Concept Videos
Epigenetic Regulation
Transcription Attenuation in Prokaryotes
There are several different mechanisms used to attenuate transcription. In ribosome mediated...
Comparing Copy Number Variations and SNPs
Copy number variations or CNVs are the structural variations that cover more than 1kb of DNA sequence. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), on the other hand, is a single nucleotide change or a point mutation that is found in more than 1%...
Cancers Originate from Somatic Mutations in a Single Cell
Epigenetic Regulation
X-chromosome...
Cancers Originate from Somatic Mutations in a Single Cell

