PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Susanne Tilk
AU  - Judith Frydman
AU  - Christina Curtis
AU  - Dmitri Petrov
TI  - Cancers adapt to their mutational load by buffering protein misfolding stress
AID  - 10.1101/2022.06.08.495407
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.06.08.495407
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/06/10/2022.06.08.495407.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/06/10/2022.06.08.495407.full
AB  - In asexual populations that don’t undergo recombination, such as cancer, deleterious mutations are expected to accrue readily due to genome-wide linkage between mutations. Despite this mutational load of often thousands of deleterious mutations, many tumors thrive. How tumors survive the damaging consequences of this mutational load is not well understood. Here, we investigate the functional consequences of mutational load in 10,295 human tumors by quantifying their phenotypic response through changes in gene expression. Using a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM), we find that high mutational load tumors up-regulate proteostasis machinery related to the mitigation and prevention of protein misfolding. We replicate these expression responses in cancer cell lines and show that the viability in high mutational load cancer cells is strongly dependent on complexes that degrade and refold proteins. This indicates that upregulation of proteostasis machinery is causally important for high mutational burden tumors and uncovers new therapeutic vulnerabilities.Competing Interest StatementC.C. is an advisor and stockholder in Grail, Ravel, DeepCell and an advisor to Genentech, Bristol Myers Squibb, 3T Biosciences and NanoString. D.A.P. is a founder of, and stockholder equity in, D2G Oncology 42 Inc.