GSE191071
Multiscale profiling of enzyme activity in cancer [Bulk-seq]
Purpose: The goal of this study was to use enzyme activity as a proxy for profiling tumor progression and treatment response in an autochthonous mouse model of Alk-mutant non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The Eml4-Alk model was originally described in Maddalo et al., Nature 2014. This dataset describes bulk RNA-seq profiling of cells from Eml4-Alk lungs following administration of a protease-activatable probe, QZ1, and sorting single cells based on signal from this probe. Methods: Eml4-Alk mice were anesthetized, and QZ1-(PEG2K) was administered intravenously via tail vein injection. Lungs were excised two hours later, separated into lobes, tumors were microdissected, and single cell suspensions were prepared. FACS sorting was performed on a FACSAria II (BD). Flow cytometry data was analyzed by the FlowJo software (Treestar). At least 100,000 cells from each of the QZ1+ and QZ1- compartments were collected into RPMI-1640 + 2% heat-inactivated FBS and pelleted via centrifugation at 1800 rpm for 5 minutes. Cell pellets were lysed in Trizol (ThermoFisher), and RNA was extracted using RNEasy Mini Kits (Qiagen), and bulk RNA sequencing was performed. Libraries were prepared using the Clontech SMARTer Stranded Total RNAseq Kit (Clontech), precleaned, and sequenced using an Illumina NextSeq500 on an Illumina NextSeq flow cell. Results: Feature counting was performed on BAM files using the Rsubread package. Differential expression analysis on QZ1+ vs QZ1- cells was performed using the DESeq2 package in R. GSEA was performed using GenePattern, and results were visualized using the clusterProfiler R package. Conclusions: This study demonstrates a method for activity-based cell sorting that can be coupled to downstream phenotypic characterization via RNA-seq. Overall design: Bulk RNA-seq profiles of cells from lungs of Eml4-Alk (EA) tumor-bearing mice administered with the protease-activatable probe QZ1. n=4 biological replicates for each of QZ1+ and QZ1- conditions.