A mouse model of endemic Burkitt translocations reveals the long-range boundaries of Ig-mediated oncogene deregulation
Igh/Myc translocations underlie both sporadic Burkitt lymphoma (BL) and the endemic clinical form affecting African children infected with malaria. However, while sporadic translocations decapitate Myc from 5'' proximal regulatory elements, most endemic events occur hundreds of kilobases away from Myc. The origin of these rearrangements and how they deregulate oncogenes at such distances remain unclear. Here we recapitulate endemic BL-like translocations in plasmacytomas from uracil N-glycosylase (UNG) deficient mice. We demonstrate that in these animals, rare endemic-like translocations arise from non-targeted DNA breaks at Myc loci. Deep-sequencing analyses revealed that the deregulated 3'' Igh enhancer alpha physically interacts with and remodels 0.45Mb of translocated chromatin. The results thus explain the long-range deregulation of oncogenes in human and mouse B cell tumors. Overall design: ChIP-Seq, 4C, and 1 RNASeq samples used to characterize mouse plasmacytoma cell lines and in vitro activated mouse B cells.  Biological replicates are present for many of the samples.