High-throughput RNA sequencing on circular RNA profiles of human triple-negative breast cancer and adjacent normal tissues. High-throughput RNA sequencing on circular RNA profiles of human triple-negative breast cancer and adjacent normal tissues

In an attempt to search for metastasis-associated circRNAs, we performed RNA-sequencing on ribosomal RNA-depleted total RNA from three pairs of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and adjacent normal tissues. A computational pipeline based on the anchor alignment of unmapped reads was used to identify circular RNAs. Taken together, 69,815 distinct circRNAs were found in this study and 87% were derived from exons, and the others were derived from introns, intergenic region and 3′ or 5′ UTR, etc. We further identified 5,033 differentially expressed circRNAs (fold change ≥ 2 and p < 0.05). Among them, 3,726 circRNAs were significantly down-regulated and 1,307 circRNAs were significantly up-regulated in TNBC tissues compared with adjacent normal tissues. These data indicate that circRNAs are abundant in human breast tissues and dysregulation of circRNAs may contribute to breast cancer progression. Overall design: Circular RNAs profiles of three pairs of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and adjacent normal tissues were generated by RNA deep-sequencing, using HiSeq3000, Illumina.