Genome position and gene amplification - higher resolution mapping of amplicons

We investigated the influence of genome position on propensity to amplify. First, we integrated a mutant form of DHFR into different positions in the human genome, challenged cells with methotrexate and then studied the genomic alterations arising in drug resistant cells. We observed site specific differences in methotrexate sensitivity, organization of amplicons and amplification frequency. One site was uniquely associated with a significantly enhanced propensity to amplify and recurrent amplicon boundaries, possibly implicating a rare folate sensitive fragile site in initiating amplification. Hierarchical clustering of gene expression patterns and subsequent gene enrichment analysis revealed two clusters differing significantly in expression of MYC target genes independent of integration site. Keywords: Gene amplification, array CGH, chromosomal fragile sites We introduced a mutant form of DHFR (L22F), which confers greater resistance to methotrexate than the wild type (endogenous) gene into HCT116+chr3 cells and isolated independent clones containing DHFR* at different positions in the genome and identified genome sequences flanking the integration site of DHFR* using inverse PCR. For further analysis, we selected only clones, which were considered to have a single insertion of DHFR* by inverse PCR (13 independent insertion sites). The individual insertion site clones were further characterized with respect to genome copy number profiles. To select methotrexate resistant colonies, we exposed cells to a concentration of methotrexate that was three to four times the IC-50 for each integration site. Genomic copy number profiles were obtained for isolated resistant colonies (GSE6262) bu using UCSF HumArray platform (GPL4421). This dataset contains higher resolution mapping of six selected amplicons on the 32K BAC genome tiling path array (GPL4422).