Comparative RNA-Seq Analysis Revealed Tissue-Specific Splicing Variations during the Generation of the PDX Model

Abstract

Tissue-specific gene expression generates fundamental differences in the function of each tissue and affects the characteristics of the tumors that are created as a result. However, it is unclear how much the tissue specificity is conserved during grafting of the primary tumor into an immune-compromised mouse model. Here, we performed a comparative RNA-seq analysis of four different primary-patient derived xenograft (PDX) tumors. The analysis revealed a conserved RNA biotype distribution of primary-PDX pairs, as revealed by previous works. Interestingly, we detected significant changes in the splicing pattern of PDX, which was mainly comprised of skipped exons. This was confirmed by splicing variant-specific RT-PCR analysis. On the other hand, the correlation analysis for the tissue-specific genes indicated overall strong positive correlations between the primary and PDX tumor pairs, with the exception of gastric cancer cases, which showed an inverse correlation. These data propose a tissue-specific change in splicing events during PDX formation as a variable factor that affects primary-PDX integrity.