Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Ryba, Tyrone

Keywords

Cancer, Genetics, Genomes

Area of Concentration

Applied Mathematics

Abstract

Cancer is an enigmatic disease of dysregulation, estimated to cause over half a million deaths in the United States in 2015 (Siegel et al., 2015). A patient’s prognosis is heavily dependent on the time of detection, fueling research into the origins, biomarkers, and early detection methods for all types of cancers (Hirsch et al., 2001). We hypothesized that the frequency of cancerous lesions in lung cancer cells may be a function of morphological features in genome architecture. Using chromatin conformation maps of human embryonic stem cells and lung cancer cells, we reproduce previously discovered topological domains, and show that cancerous lesions occur preferentially along domain boundaries. Furthermore, we find that topological domains are conserved and form a natural ordering of chromatin at different genomic scales. These findings strengthen the notion that topological domains are a fundamentally important level of genomic regulation, and motivate research into the potential relationship between topological structure and disease.

Download

Share

COinS