The transcriptional program of feline injection-site sarcoma

Background:

Soft tissue sarcomas are common skin tumors in cats. Feline injection-site associated sarcoma (FISS) is an aggressive subtype that develops at sites of previous injection and whose pathogenesis is poorly understood.

Materials and Methods:

FISS vs. normal tissue were comparatively profiled by high-throughput short-read paired-end sequencing, for cancer/normal gene expression levels followed by post-hoc analyses.

Results:

Our research found transcriptional alterations in FISS vs. normal tissue and identified large overlap between human orthologs of cat genes with altered transcriptional abundances in FISS and known human tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes. A 10 Mbp region of potential somatic copy number alteration (SCNA) in FISS is syntenic to a human genomic region with recurrent SCNA in human sarcomas. Our results closely align with findings in human and canine sarcomas.

Conclusions:

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mRNA sequencing-based transcriptome profiling study of FISS and any cancer in cats.