Epigenetic Germline Variants Predict Cancer Prognosis and Risk and Distribute Uniquely in Topologically Associating Domains

Abstract

Cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease caused by genetic and epigenetic alterations in normal cells. A recent study uncovered methylation quantitative trait loci (meQTLs) associated with different levels of local DNA methylation in cancers. Here, we investigated whether the distribution of cancer meQTLs reflected functional organization of the genome in the form of chromatin topologically associated domains (TADs), and evaluated whether cancer meQTLs near known driver genes have the potential to influence cancer risk or progression. At TAD boundaries, we observed differences in the distribution of meQTLs when one or both of the adjacent TADs was transcriptionally active, with higher densities near inactive TADs. Furthermore, we found differences in cancer meQTL distributions in active versus inactive TADs and observed an enrichment of meQTLs in active TADs near tumor suppressors, whereas there was a depletion of such meQTLs near oncogenes. Several meQTLs were associated with cancer risk in the UKBioBank, and we were able to reproduce breast cancer risk associations in the DRIVE cohort. Survival analysis in TCGA implicated a number of meQTLs in 13 tumor types. In 10 of these, polygenic meQTL scores were associated with increased hazard in a CoxPH analysis. Risk and survival-associated meQTLs tended to affect cancer genes involved in DNA damage repair and cellular adhesion and reproduced cancer-specific associations reported in prior literature. In summary, this study provides evidence that genetic variants that influence local DNA methylation are affected by chromatin structure and can impact tumor evolution.