DNA Copy Number Changes Have Gene Dosage Effects with Consequent Impact On Disease Biology and Prognosis in Multiple Myeloma

Abstract 3984

Copy number alterations, deletions and amplifications, are very frequent in multiple myeloma (MM), however, it is less clear how these alterations affect gene expression. We performed a genome-wide analysis of 170 newly-diagnosed uniformly treated MM patients using high-density SNP arrays and Exon ST 1.0 gene expression arrays, and evaluated how copy number alterations affect gene expression in MM. Using SNP array data just over 40% patients had hyperdiploid MM (HMM) while the rest had non-hyperdiploid MM (N-HMM). We used two-step procedure to identify dosage effect scores of genes. At first, for each gene, percentage of copy number altered samples was calculated. Then for each gene percentage of samples that had dosage effect was calculated. Finally dosage effect score for each gene was calculated as a ratio of dosage effect samples percentage to copy number alteration sample percentage. We show that dosage effect in MM is wide-spread and some chromosomal locations are affected by dosage effect more compared to other locations. The dosage effect tracks can be observed at trisomy chromosomes and chromosome 1q, but most explicitly at chromosome 9, 11, 15 and 19. Also for deleted genes, dosage effect can be mostly observed at chromosome 13 and 16q. Separate analysis of HMM and N-HMM patients also showed that HMM patients have higher dosage effect especially in chromosome 15 compared to the others. In addition, relation between dosage effect and gene expression analysis show that the highly expressed genes have significantly higher dosage effect compared to the lowly expressed genes. Also function enrichment analysis showed that genes involved with crucial biological processes including translation, RNA processing and transcription factor genes are enriched in genes with higher dosage effect. Interstingly, dosage resistant genes are enriched in cell death and GTPase processes. These results help us understand the impact of aneuploidy in MM on global gene expression changes. In conclusion, our analysis identifies concordant and discordant gene expression changes associated with DNA copy number alterations, identifying genes and pathways that may play an important role in myeloma disease behavior as well as prognosis.