Chromothripsis during telomere crisis is independent of NHEJ and consistent with a replicative origin
Abstract
Telomere erosion, dysfunction and fusion can lead to a state of cellular crisis characterized by large-scale genome instability. We investigated the impact of a telomere-driven crisis on the structural integrity of the genome by undertaking whole genome sequence analyses of clonal populations of cells that had escaped crisis. Quantification of large-scale structural variants revealed patterns of rearrangement consistent with chromothripsis, but formed in the absence of functional non-homologous end joining pathways. Rearrangements frequently consisted of short fragments with complex mutational patterns, with a repair topology that deviated from randomness showing preferential repair to local regions or exchange between specific loci. We find evidence of telomere involvement with an enrichment of fold-back inversions demarcating clusters of rearrangements. Our data suggest that chromothriptic rearrangements caused by telomere crisis arise via a replicative repair process involving template switching.
- Received June 14, 2018.
- Accepted March 11, 2019.
- Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
This manuscript is Open Access.
This article, published in Genome Research, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution 4.0 International license), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
