journal contribution
posted on 2023-03-31, 22:43 authored by Huanjun Wang, Yan Mei, Cheng Luo, Qun Huang, Zifeng Wang, Guan-Ming Lu, Lili Qin, Zhun Sun, Chao-Wen Huang, Zhi-Wen Yang, Junxing Chen, Weiguo Yin, Chao-Nan Qian, Jianming Zeng, Lingwu Chen, Qibin Leng, Yan Guo, Guangshuai Jia Supplementary Data from Single-Cell Analyses Reveal Mechanisms of Cancer Stem Cell Maintenance and Epithelial–Mesenchymal Transition in Recurrent Bladder Cancer
Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong
National Key Project for Infectious Diseases of China
Sun Yat-sen University
History
ARTICLE ABSTRACT
Bladder cancer treatment remains a major clinical challenge due to therapy resistance and a high recurrence rate. Profiling intratumor heterogeneity can reveal the molecular mechanism of bladder cancer recurrence.
Here, we performed single-cell RNA sequencing and Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq) on tumors from 13 patients with low recurrence risk, high recurrence risk, and recurrent bladder cancer.
Our study generated a comprehensive cancer-cell atlas consisting of 54,971 single cells and identified distinct cell subpopulations. We found that the cancer stem-cell subpopulation is enriched during bladder cancer recurrence with elevated expression of EZH2. We further defined a subpopulation-specific molecular mechanism whereby EZH2 maintains H3K27me3-mediated repression of the NCAM1 gene, thereby inactivating the cell invasive and stemness transcriptional program. Furthermore, taking advantage of this large single-cell dataset, we elucidated the spectrum of epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) in clinical samples and revealed distinct EMT features associated with bladder cancer subtypes. We identified that TCF7 promotes EMT in corroboration with single-cell ATAC with high-throughput sequencing (scATAC-seq) analysis. Additionally, we constructed regulatory networks specific to recurrent bladder cancer.
Our study and analytic approaches herein provide a rich resource for the further study of cancer stem cells and EMT in the bladder cancer research field.
