Human transposons are an abundant supply of transcription factor binding sites and promoter activities in breast cancer cell lines.

摘要: Transposable elements (TE) are commonly regarded as “junk DNA” with no apparent regulatory roles in the human genome. However, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that some TEs exhibit activities range biological pathways and diseases, notable examples bile metabolism innate immunity. typically suppressed by epigenetic modifications healthy somatic tissues, which prevents both undesirable effects insertional mutagenesis, also unwanted gene activation. Interestingly, widely reported to be dysregulated epithelial cancers, while much attention has been paid their on genome instability, relatively little regulation. Here, we investigated contribution transcriptional regulation breast cancer cell lines. We found subset TE subfamilies were enriched oncogenic transcription factor binding sites harboured histone marks associated active transcription, raising possibility these playing broad role To directly assess promoter activity triple negative lines, identified four cancer-associated genes putative TE-derived promoters. deletion confirmed all cases, for two was almost completely contained within TE. Our findings demonstrate provide abundant individual contain substantial activity. further through exaptation demonstrating potential multiple