KDM4B mutations in human cancers

Homologous recombination (HR) is essential for repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and restart of stalled or collapsed replication forks. Most cancers are characterized by mutations in components of the DSB repair pathways. Redundant DSB repair pathways exist in eukaryotes from yeast to humans and recent evidence has shown that complete loss of HR function appears to be lethal. Recent evidence has also shown that cancer cells with mutations in one DSB repair pathway can be killed by inhibiting one or more parallel pathways, a strategy that is currently aggressively explored as a cancer therapy. KDM4B is a histone demethylase with pleiotropic functions, which participates in preparing DSBs for repair by contributing to chromatin remodeling. In this report we carried out a pan-cancer analysis of KDM4B mutations with the goal of understanding their distribution and interaction with other DSB genes. We find that although KDM4B mutations co-occur with DSB repair genes, most KDM4B mutations are not drivers or pathogenic. A sequence conservation analysis from yeast to humans shows that highly conserved residues are resistant to mutation. Finally, all mutations occur in a heterozygous state. A single mutation, R986L, was predicted to significantly affect protein structure using computational modeling. This analysis suggests that KDM4B makes contributions to DSB repair but is not a key player.