Identification of new genes involved in germline predisposition to early-onset gastric cancer

Abstract

The genetic cause for several families with gastric cancer (GC) aggregation is unclear, with marked relevance in early-onset patients. We aimed to identify new candidate genes involved in GC germline predisposition. Whole-exome sequencing (WES) of germline samples was performed in 20 early-onset GC patients without previous germline mutation identified. WES was also performed in nine tumor samples to analyze the somatic profile using SigProfilerExtractor tool. Sequencing germline data were filtered to select those variants with plausible pathogenicity, rare frequency and previously involved in cancer. Then, a manual filtering was performed to prioritize genes according to current knowledge and function. These genetic variants were prevalidated with Integrative Genomics Viewer 2.8.2 (IGV). Subsequently, a further selection step was carried out according to function and information obtained from tumor samples. After IGV and selection step, 58 genetic variants in 52 different candidate genes were validated by Sanger sequencing. Among them, APC, FAT4, CTNND1 and TLR2 seem to be the most promising genes because of their role in hereditary cancer syndromes, tumor suppression, cell adhesion and Helicobacter pylori recognition, respec-tively. These encouraging results represent the open door to the identification of new genes involved in GC germline predisposition.