Colorectal and ovarian mouse tumors

In the field of cancer research, methods to test and characterize translational mouse models have co-evolved with human research. Currently, one facet of murine research has been the lack of an effective and efficient way to molecularly characterize these mouse models of cancer. Some of problems presented are the inherently smaller tumor sizes from mice present low-level of genomic content able to be sequenced. The challenges for an efficient and effective molecular characterization (via NGS sequencing) of mouse models of cancer, are also present and solved in human tumor sequencing. Our study leveraged current literature on clinical sequencing of cancers to build a preliminary comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) method via amplicon-based targeted sequencing to molecularly characterize mouse models of cancer. The preliminary CGP was applied to two cohorts of genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs), colorectal and ovarian. The aim of our sequencing was to credential these GEMMs by characterizing simple mutational events like conserved hotspot mutations, high-level amplification, homozygous deletions, mouse strain admixture, fraction of the genome altered, aneuploidy frequency and conserved aneuploidy events. The amplicon-based panel consisted of 1297 amplicons measuring copy-number for 74 cancer-related genes, 533 amplicons measuring 31 oncogenes, 1942 amplicons measuring 30 tumor suppressor genes and 490 amplicons for mouse strain estimation.