Abstract

Genome instability is a hallmark of cancer and somatic structural variations (SVs) are common in cancer genomes. My lab focuses on the molecular mechanisms leading to somatic SVs and their functional consequences in diseases. We develop new computational methods to delineate SV signatures that reflect distinct molecular mechanisms. Intriguingly, some SVs are extremely complex and are formed as catastrophic events. We decompose complex SV signatures based on patterns of the SV events and deconvolute simple SV signatures using non-negative matrix factorization.Several new signatures are discovered. In particular, we find that transcription and DNA replication collision is likely to cause large tandem duplications in many tumor types. The collision repair deficiency can be therapeutically targeted. Moreover, we study how SVs in non-coding regions can drive cancer. We develop a new computational algorithm to predict candidate oncogenes activated by distal enhancers due to somatic SVs and are able to validate their oncogenic functions using in vitro and in vivo experiments.  

About the Speaker:

Dr. Yang obtained a PhD in Genetic at University of Georgia. His postdoc training was at Department of Biomedical Informatics in Harvard Medical School. He started his own lab in 2017 at Ben May Department for Cancer Research, University of Chicago.His lab uses data-driven and experimental approaches to understand the mechanisms of tumorigenesis and discover new drug targets

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