Abstract P44: Transposable Element Patterns Across Genetic Ancestries in Prostate Cancer Patients
Nicholas Steven Korvink, Lucas Ueta, Hannah Lui Park, Farah RahmatpanahAbstract
Introduction:
Prostate cancer (PCa) is a significant burden to men with African ancestry, however, the mechanism of how ancestry contributes to aggressive PCa in these patients is not well understood. We have identified differences in endogenous retrovirus (ERV) expression between ancestries. In prostate and cervical cancer, we have demonstrated that ERV expression signatures are useful for identifying increased risk of disease progression. Using ERVcaller we investigated polymorphic transposon elements (TE) and ERV insertions unique to tumor cells compared to normal blood in PCa patients of African (AF) and European ancestry (EU).
Method:
ERVcaller software detects insertions on TE families, Alu, LINE1, SVA, and HERV-K, using whole genome sequencing (WGS). We gathered publicly available WGS data (FASTQ files) from the European Nucleotide Archive (SRA accession SRP119289). These were sequenced from paired blood and tumor samples from 6 AF and 9 EU PCa patients. We processed this data with ERVcaller, revealing TE insertions present in each patient sample. These insertions were then analyzed for statistical differences and visually mapped to their chromosomal locations using chromoMap.
Results:
Statistical analysis revealed significantly higher counts of TE insertions in the tumors of AF patients (mean = 5725) compared to their EU counterparts (mean = 4318; p ≈ 2.845 × 10−4). Additionally, we found no significant differences in TE insertions in blood samples of AF patients (mean = 3705) relative to EU patients (mean = 3269; p ≈ 0.1680), suggesting that this differential insertion pattern is isolated to the affected tumor region. Notably, chromosome 8 harbored the largest difference in TE insertion counts between AF and EU, while chromosome 19 held the most insertions overall.
Conclusion:
ERVs have previously demonstrated important roles in the development of various diseases. Our findings demonstrate significant variations in TE insertions in tumors of PCa patients across genetic ancestries.
Citation Format:
Nicholas Steven Korvink, Lucas Ueta, Hannah Lui Park, Farah Rahmatpanah. Transposable Element Patterns Across Genetic Ancestries in Prostate Cancer Patients [abstract]. In: Proceedings of Frontiers in Cancer Science 2025; 2025 Nov 5-7; Singapore. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2026;86(13_Suppl):Abstract nr P44.