Abstract

 

Breast cancer encompasses a major portion of human cancers and still needs to be carefully monitored for appropriate diagnoses and treatments. Among the many types of breast cancers, triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is known to have the worst prognosis and the least cases reported. To have a better understanding and a more decisive precursor for TNBC, two major histone modifications, an activating modification H3K4me3 and a repressive modification H3K27me3, were analyzed using data from normal breast cell lines against TNBC cell lines. The combination of these two histone markers on the gene promoter regions showed a great correlation with gene expression. A list of signature genes was defined as active (highly enriched H3K4me3), including NOVA1, NAT8L and MMP16, and repressive genes (highly enriched H3K27me3), IRX2 and ADRB2, according to the distribution of these histone modifications on the promoter regions. To further enhance the investigation, potential candidates were also compared with other types of breast cancer to find signs specific to TNBC. RNA-seq data was implemented to confirm and verify gene regulation governed by histone modifications. Combinations of the biomarkers based on H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 showed the diagnostic value AUC 93.28% with p-valve of 1.16e-226. This study suggests that histone modification analysis of opposing histone modifications might be useful to develop biomarkers and targets for TNBC.