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Somatically acquired chromosomal rearrangements occur at early stages during tumorigenesis and can be used to indirectly detect tumor cells, serving as highly sensitive and tumor-specific biomarkers. Advances in high-throughput sequencing have allowed the genome-wide identification of patient-specific chromosomal rearrangements to be used as personalized biomarkers to efficiently assess response to treatment, detect residual disease and monitor disease recurrence. However, sequencing and data processing costs still represent major obstacles for the widespread application of personalized biomarkers in oncology. We developed a computational pipeline (ICRmax) for the cost-effective identification of a minimal set of tumor-specific interchromosomal rearrangements (ICRs). We examined ICRmax performance on sequencing data from rectal tumors and simulated data achieving an average accuracy of 68% for ICR identification. ICRmax identifies ICRs from low-coverage sequenced tumors, eliminates the need to sequence a matched normal tissue and significantly reduces the costs that limit the utilization of personalized biomarkers in the clinical setting., (Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Cancer/testis Antigens (CTAs) are immunogenic proteins with a restricted expression pattern in normal tissues and aberrant expression in different types of tumors being considered promising candidates for immunotherapy. We used the alignment between EST sequences and the human genome sequence to identify novel CT genes. By examining the EST tissue composition of known CT clusters we defined parameters for the selection of 1184 EST clusters corresponding to putative CT genes. The expression pattern of 70 CT gene candidates was evaluated by RT-PCR in 21 normal tissues, 17 tumor cell lines and 160 primary tumors. We were able to identify 4 CT genes expressed in different types of tumors. The presence of antibodies against the protein encoded by 1 of these 4 CT genes (FAM46D) was exclusively detected in plasma samples from cancer patients. Due to its restricted expression pattern and immunogenicity FAM46D represents a novel target for cancer immunotherapy.

The inhibitory effect of supraphysiological iodide concentrations on thyroid hormone synthesis (Wolff-Chaikoff effect) and on thyrocyte proliferation is largely known as iodine autoregulation. However, the molecular mechanisms by which iodide modulates thyroid function remain unclear. In this paper, we analyze the transcriptome profile of the rat follicular cell lineage PCCl3 under untreated and treated conditions with 10(-3) M sodium iodide (NaI). Serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) revealed 84 transcripts differentially expressed in response to iodide (p