A New Approach of Detecting Fusion Oncogenes by RNA Sequencing Exon Coverage Analysis.

Background: In clinical practice, various methods are used to identify gene rearrangements in tumor samples, ranging from "classic" techniques, such as IHC, FISH, and RT-qPCR, to more advanced highly multiplexed approaches, such as NanoString technology and NGS panels. Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages, but they share the drawback of detecting only a restricted (although sometimes quite extensive) set of preselected biomarkers. At the same time, whole transcriptome sequencing (WTS, RNAseq) can, in principle, be used to detect gene fusions while simultaneously analyzing an incomparably wide range of tumor characteristics.

Bioinformatic and clinical experimental assay uncovers resistance and susceptibility mechanisms of human glioblastomas to temozolomide and identifies new combined and individual survival biomarkers outperforming promoter methylation.

Background: Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive and lethal central nervous system (CNS) tumor. The treatment strategy is mainly surgery and/or radiation therapy, both combined with adjuvant temozolomide (TMZ) chemotherapy. Historically, methylation of gene promoter is used as the major biomarker predicting individual tumor response to TMZ.

Pan-cancer experimental characteristic of human transcriptional patterns connected with telomerase reverse transcriptase () gene expression status.

The gene encodes the reverse transcriptase subunit of telomerase and is normally transcriptionally suppressed in differentiated human cells but reactivated in cancers where its expression is frequently associated with poor survival prognosis. Here we experimentally assessed the RNA sequencing expression patterns associated with transcription in 1039 human cancer samples of 27 tumor types. We observed a bimodal distribution of expression where ∼27% of cancer samples did not express and the rest showed a bell-shaped distribution.