PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lilit Nersisyan
AU  - Arman Simonyan
AU  - Hans Binder
AU  - Arsen Arakelyan
TI  - Telomere maintenance pathway activity analysis enables tissue- and gene-level inferences
AID  - 10.1101/2021.02.01.429081
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.02.01.429081
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/02/2021.02.01.429081.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/02/2021.02.01.429081.full
AB  - Telomere maintenance is one of the mechanisms ensuring indefinite divisions of cancer and stem cells. Good understanding of telomere maintenance mechanisms (TMM) is important for studying cancers and designing therapies. However, molecular factors triggering selective activation of either the telomerase dependent (TEL) or the alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT) pathway are poorly understood. In addition, more accurate and easy-to-use methodologies are required for TMM phenotyping. In this study, we have performed literature based reconstruction of signaling pathways for the ALT and TEL TMMs. Gene expression data were used for computational assessment of TMM pathway activities and compared with experimental assays for TEL and ALT. Explicit consideration of pathway topology makes bioinformatics analysis more informative compared to computational methods based on simple summary measures of gene expression. Application to healthy human tissues showed high ALT and TEL pathway activities in testis, and identified genes and pathways that may trigger TMM activation. Our approach offers a novel option for systematic investigation of TMM activation patterns across cancers and healthy tissues for dissecting pathway-based molecular markers with diagnostic impact.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.