Abstract
Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed neoplasm in women worldwide with a well-recognized heterogeneous pathology, classified into four molecular subtypes: Luminal A, Luminal B, HER2-enriched and Basal-like, each one with different biological and clinical characteristics. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) represent 33% of the human transcriptome and play critical roles in breast carcinogenesis, but most of their functions are still unknown. Therefore, cancer research could benefit from continued exploration into the biology of lncRNAs in this neoplasm. We characterized lncRNA expression portraits in 74 breast tumors belonging to the four molecular subtypes using transcriptome microarrays. To infer the biological role of the deregulated lncRNAs in the molecular subtypes, we performed co-expression analysis of lncRNA-mRNA and gene ontology analysis. We identified 307 deregulated lncRNAs in tumor compared to normal tissue and 354 deregulated lncRNAs among the different molecular subtypes. Through co-expression analysis between lncRNAs and protein-coding genes, along with gene enrichment analysis, we inferred the potential function of the most deregulated lncRNAs in each molecular subtype, and independently validated our results taking advantage of TCGA data. Overexpression of the AC009283.1 was observed in the HER2-enriched subtype and it is localized in an amplification zone at chromosome 17q12, suggesting it to be a potential tumorigenic lncRNA. The functional role of lncRNA AC009283.1 was examined through loss of function assays in vitro and determining its impact on global gene expression. These studies revealed that AC009283.1 regulates genes involved in proliferation, cell cycle and apoptosis in a HER2 cellular model. We further confirmed these findings through ssGSEA and CEMITool analysis in an independent HER2-amplified breast cancer cohort. Our findings suggest a wide range of biological functions for lncRNAs in each breast cancer molecular subtype and provide a basis for their biological and functional study, as was conducted for AC009283.1, showing it to be a potential regulator of proliferation and apoptosis in the HER2-enriched subtype.