In excess of % of human cancer incidents have a viral cofactor. Epidemiological studies of idiopathic human cancers indicate that additional tumor viruses remain to be discovered. Recent advances in sequencing technology have enabled systematic screenings of human tumor transcriptomes for viral transcripts. However, technical problems such as low abundances of viral transcripts in large volumes of sequencing data, viral sequence divergence, and homology between viral and human factors significantly confound identification of tumor viruses. We have developed a novel computational approach for detecting viral transcripts in human cancers that takes the aforementioned confounding factors into account and is applicable to a wide variety of viruses and tumors. We apply the approach to conducting the first systematic search for viruses in neuroblastoma, the most common cancer in infancy. The diverse clinical progression of this disease as well as related epidemiological and virological findings are highly suggestive of a pathogenic cofactor. However, a viral etiology of neuroblastoma is currently contested. We mapped transcriptomes of neuroblastoma as well as positive and negative controls to the human and all known viral genomes in order to detect both known and unknown viruses. Analysis of controls, comparisons with related methods, and statistical estimates demonstrate the high sensitivity of our approach. Detailed investigation of putative viral transcripts within neuroblastoma samples did not provide evidence for the existence of any known human viruses. Likewise, de-novo assembly and analysis of chimeric transcripts did not result in expression signatures associated with novel human pathogens. While confounding factors such as sample dilution or viral clearance in progressed tumors may mask viral cofactors in the data, in principle, this is rendered less likely by the high sensitivity of our approach and the number of biological replicates analyzed. Therefore, our results suggest that frequent viral cofactors of metastatic neuroblastoma are unlikely.
To date, pathogenic agents are known to be causally related to 20% of human cancer cases [1] and significantly affect the global health burden of this disease [2]. The majority of these agents comprise oncogenic viruses such as human papilloma virus (HPV), Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), and hepatitis C virus (HCV) [3]. Characterizing the oncogenic potential of viral pathogens has important consequences for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of malignant neoplasms [4], [5]. Tumor viruses in particular have received renewed attention in the context of recent global efforts to characterize the etiology of cancer [6], [7]. Consequently, viral cofactors for several idiopathic cancers are currently investigated [8] and epidemiological indicators suggest that additional human tumor viruses remain to be discovered [9]. Neuroblastoma is a heterogeneous embryonal tumor [10], [11] that is accountable for 15% of deaths caused by malignant conditions in children [12]. The disease is associated with an exceptionally low median age of presentation of months [13] and is often diagnosed in utero. Metastatic neuroblastoma has two biologically divergent subtypes. Stage 4S is characterized by an age of presentation between in utero and months, metastases confined to liver, skin, lymph nodes and bone marrow, and its ability to regress spontaneously [14], [15]. In contrast, stage 4 tumors are presented at any age, demonstrate high infiltration rates in bone marrow and bone, and are most often progressive [10], [16]. While genes related to neuronal differentiation have been described to be upregulated in stage 4S in comparison to stage 4 neuroblastoma, thereby indicating distinct levels of neuronal differentiation [17], little is currently known about the differences between molecular etiologies of stage 4 and stage 4S neuroblastoma. The variation of clinical outcomes between neuroblastoma subtypes indicates distinct genetic and environmental factors affecting the development of this malignancy. Interestingly, the early onset of the disease overlaps with periods of high susceptibility to viral infections and is reminiscent of acute lymphoblastic leukemia – another pediatric tumor with uncertain etiology for which an infective cofactor has long been suspected [18]. Furthermore, epidemiological studies have associated reduced neuroblastoma risk with immunologic indicators such as previous childhood infections, day care attendance, and breast feeding [19], [20] that are suggestive of an infective cofactor [21]. While transforming polyomaviruses such as JCV and BKV were previously identified within neuroblastoma samples and other pediatric embryonal tumors [22]–[24], newer studies seem to render these associations inconclusive [25]. Therefore, the role of pathogenic cofactors of neuroblastoma oncogenesis remains unresolved. In general, the search for suspected viral cofactors of idiopathic diseases requires systematic screening of human tissues for viral biomarkers such as virus-derived nucleotide sequences. Unfortunately, viruses are of polyphyletic origin and thus lack common universal marker genes as they are frequently exploited in metagenomics studies targeting cellular microorganisms. Consequently, it is not currently possible to specifically PCR-amplify viral nucleotide sequences within a given tissue without prior information about the infective agent being sought [26]. As a result, several systematic assays for pathogen detection have been developed that do not rely on targeted PCR-amplification of viral factors [27] and were employed to identify Kaposi' s sarcoma-associated herpes virus (KSHV) as a human tumor virus [28]. These systematic approaches were recently supplemented by sensitive deep sequencing technologies [27]. These technologies were recently applied to exclude several cancer-virus associations based on negative evidence [29], [30] and aided in the identification of MCPyV, a human polyomavirus, as a cofactor of Merkel cell carcinoma [31]. Deep sequencing technologies have enabled detection of both known and novel viruses with unprecedented sensitivity [32]. However, the large numbers of sequence fragments (“reads”) generated by these methods necessitate data reduction approaches for filtering and condensing the list of putative viral transcripts. Two such approaches are currently represented in the literature: digital transcript subtraction that discards human sequence homologs from the sequence data and considers the remaining transcripts as potential viral signatures [30], [31], [33]–[39], and de-novo sequence assembly that aims to reconstruct whole viral genomes from overlapping reads [40]–[43]. Recently, variants of these of two approaches have been implemented in several computational pipelines such as PathSeq [44], RINS [45], and CaPSID [46]. Identification of tumor viruses in particular poses several important challenges to existing computational pipelines. Confounding factors such as loss of viral genetic material from progressed tumors as well as limited replication competence or latent replication strategies often result in low or selective transcription of tumor viruses [5]. In addition, viral oncogenes homologous to human factors and chimeric transcripts originating from proviral insertion sites may share significant sequence similarity with human transcripts [47], thus making unequivocal identification of viral factors difficult. Last, high rates of viral sequence divergence from (dsDNA viruses) up to (ssRNA viruses) substitutions per site and year [48], [49] hinder recognition of known viruses based on known reference sequences. We have developed Virana, a novel computational approach specifically tailored to detecting low-abundance transcripts that diverge from known viral reference sequences or share significant sequence homology with human factors. In particular, our method maps sequence reads to a combined reference database comprising the human genome and all known viral reference sequences. The approach is configured to allow for high mismatch rates and mappings to multiple reference sequences (‘multimaps’). By using this combined and sensitive mapping strategy, our approach is especially well suited for detecting human-viral chimeric transcripts and viruses diverging from known references. In contrast to existing subtractive approaches for viral transcript discovery, our method abstains from discarding reads homologous to the human genome from further analysis. Instead, Virana exploits multimaps to assign sequence reads to a homologous context comprising human reference transcripts and viral reference genomes. These homologous regions retain the full, unfiltered information contained in the raw sequence data while also being amenable to further analyses by multiple sequence alignments, human-viral phylogenies, and orthogonal taxonomic annotations, thus greatly aiding in the interpretation of the results. We applied our novel approach on an overall number of deep sequencing transcriptomes of stage 4 and stage 4S metastatic neuroblastoma in order to identify putative viral cofactors associated with this idiopathic disease.
Primary neuroblastoma samples from stage 4 (progressive) patients () and stage 4S (regressive) patients (were obtained prior to treatment from the central neuroblastoma tumor bank at the University Hospital of Cologne, Germany. None of the tumors harbored amplification of the MYCN proto-oncogene as determined by two independent laboratories for each case by fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) and Southern blot [50]. Only neuroblastoma samples with a tumor cell content of above % as assessed by a pathologist were selected for deep sequencing. Integrity of RNA was evaluated using the Bioanalyzer (Agilent Technologies) and only samples with an RNA integrity number of at least were considered for further processing. Quality of all neuroblastoma samples and related deep sequencing data was additionally confirmed by an orthogonal computational analysis focusing on human gene expression in the context of differential splicing [51]. All patients were enrolled in the German Neuroblastoma trials with informed consent. In order to validate our approach we additionally employed a positive control panel consisting of tumors with known viral cofactors. An EBV-positive B-cell-lymphoma (BCL) was received from the Pediatric Oncology and Hematology Department of the Hannover Medical School. Deep-sequencing reads obtained from full transcriptome libraries of two HPV18-positive HeLa samples (HeLa) and a HPV16-positive primary cervical squamous cell carcinoma (ceSCC) were downloaded from the Short Read Archive (SRA) and preprocessed as specified in the original publication [30]. Transcriptome data of a HBV-positive hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) HKCI-5 cell line with confirmed HBV integration events was downloaded from the SRA based on information in the original publication [52]. A negative control panel consisting of a normal brain transcriptome generated as part of the Illumina BodyMap 2. 0 project was obtained from the SRA at run accession number ERR030882. mRNA libraries of the EBV-positive B-cell lymphoma and neuroblastomas were prepared following the Illumina RNA Sample Preparation Kit and Guide (Part # Rev. A). For each sample, g high-quality total RNA was processed for mRNA purification, chemical fragmentation, first strand synthesis, second strand synthesis, end repair, ′-end adenylation, adapter ligation, and PCR amplification. Validated libraries underwent gel size selection and final paired-end sequencing with an effective read length of bp on the Illumina Genome Analyzer IIx following Illumina standard protocols. Additionally, libraries for two of the neuroblastoma samples were generated using the same protocols and sequenced with an effective paired-end read length of bp on a Illumina HiSeq. All libraries had insert size distributions approximating bp, bp as later confirmed by read mapping. The data were filtered according to signal purity by the Illumina Realtime Analysis (RTA) software. In this study we employ simulated sequencing data from three viral genomes that are homologous to human factors. Reads originating from the ABL1-homologue of the Abelson murine leukemia virus (A-MuLV, GI: 9626953, positions), from the the gag region of HERVK22I (obtained from Repbase [53], positions), and from Bo17, a GCNT3-homolog of the bovine herpesvirus 4 (BoHV-4, GI: 13095578, positions) were generated in silico by dwgsim, a read simulator based on wgsim [54]. In addition, we produced simulated chimeric transcripts by fusing each of the aforementioned sequence regions to the human TP53 gene, a known proto-oncogene (UCSC build hg19, GRCh37, chr17, positions 7572926–7579569). These artificial fusion transcripts were generated using Fusim [55] based on TP53 exon models obtained from the UCSC refGene database [56]. Fusion transcripts were then used as templates for generating simulated data sets with dwgsim. In all cases, dwgsim was applied using the default empirical error model. Paired-end read lengths and insert size distributions were chosen according to the neuroblastoma sequencing data (see above). Additional simulated sequencing data generated by a related publication were analyzed as described in Section “Estimation of read mapping sensitivity”. Sample panels containing neuroblastoma transcriptomes sequenced at bp and bp effective read lengths are denoted as NB1 and NB2, respectively. While the NB1 panel contains seven transcriptomes of neuroblastoma stages 4 and 4S each, the NB2 panel contains one sample of stages 4 and 4S each (see Table 1). Positive control panels of human cancer transcriptomes with known viral cofactors (BCL, HeLa, ceSCC, and HCC) are denoted as POS. The negative control panel consisting of a normal human brain transcriptome is denoted as NEG. The current assembly of the human reference genome (UCSC build hg19, GRCh37) as well as corresponding refGene splice-site annotations were obtained from UCSC. Splice variant annotations and cDNA sequences for the human genome were downloaded from Ensembl [57]. A set of all available complete viral reference genomes and their taxonomic lineages were obtained from NCBI via the E-utilities web service [58] and the database query: “Viruses[Organism] AND srcdb_refseq[PROP] NOT cellular organisms [ORGN]”. In addition, we obtained consensus reference sequences for all human endogenous retroviruses (HERV-K/HML-2) represented in Repbase (Primate HERV, HERVK11DI, HERVK11I, HERVK13I, HERVK22I, HERVK3I, HERVK9I, HERVKC4) ) [53]. All reference genomes were combined into a single human-viral reference database for Virana. Since RINS and CaPSID cannot use such a combined database, human and viral reference sequences were collected within two separate databases for these approaches. Paired-end reads from the neuroblastoma panels and positive control panels were quality-controlled with an in-house sequence analysis framework in order to identify sample contamination, adapter contamination, and batch effects. After quality control, the sequence data consisted of Gbp (NB1), Gbp (NB2), Gbp (POS), and Gbp (NEG) of sequence reads, respectively (see Table 1). All data were mapped against a combined human-viral reference database with the splicing-aware and gapped read mapper STAR [59] in paired-end mode. While Virana considers the read mapper to be a replaceable component, in principle, we decided to employ STAR due to its mapping speed, high sensitivity settings, and its consideration of putative chimeric transcripts. We configured the mapper for high sensitivity by following recommendations of the author of STAR (personal communication). In particular, we set the rate of acceptable mismatches to times the length of each read and the seedSearchStartLmax and winAnchorMultimapNmax parameters to and, respectively. The minimum length of chimeric segments (chimSegmentMin) was reduced to in order to detect fusion transcripts at short read lengths. Known splice sites from splice annotations of the human reference genome as well as canonical splice sites were considered in the mapping. For each read, multiple mapping locations with alignment score distances of up to ranks relative to the best score were permitted (‘multimaps’). Read alignments were stored in standardized BAM files. STAR supports detection of chimeric transcripts by reporting discordant read pairs whose ends map to different chromosomes. These discordant read pairs were employed in further analyses as detailed in the next section. In order to identify putative new viral transcripts, read pairs with at least one unmapped read end were extracted from BAM files by the Samtools suite [54] and assembled into longer contigs by the de-novo transcriptome assemblers Trinity [60] and Oases [61] using default parameters. Oases was configured for using different k-mer values in order to facilitate reconstruction of low-abundance viral transcripts. Contigs of length less than bp were considered to be spurious assemblies and excluded from further processing. Virana supports detection of human-viral chimeric transcripts in two different manners. First, the read mapper employed in our study is able to partially align reads that contain a human-viral chimeric breakpoint to multiple reference sequences. Consequently, these partially aligned reads can be detected by Virana within the generic analysis of homologous regions (see below). The second, more sensitive approach to detecting chimeric transcripts is based on paired-end read information. Since the STAR mapper assigns reads to a combined reference database comprising both human and viral reference sequences, ends of paired-end reads whose inserts span the breakpoint of a chimeric transcript will be aligned to different reference sequences. These discordant read pairs are reported by STAR during read mapping (see above) and can further be filtered by mismatch score or sequence complexity in order to yield a high-confidence list of chimeric transcripts. A distinguishing feature of Virana is its ability to automatically reconstruct the homologous context of reads that map to both viral and human reference sequences. This homologous context is constructed in four steps: Consensus sequences can be further processed by phylogenetic analyses. For generating phylogenies, Virana employs the software PhyML [64] following the maximum likelihood approach and using default parameters recommended by the HIV sequence database (http: //hiv. lanl. gov, GTR model of nucleotide substitution, transition/transversion ratio: 4, gamma shape parameter: 1, number of substation rate categories: 4, approximate Likelihood Ratio Test (aLRT) using SH-like supports where applicable). We note that the topology of the phylogenetic trees constructed in this manner is stable with regard to the model choice; while more complex model parameters may yield better likelihoods in some instances, these differences do not influence interpretation of our results. In this study, we additionally compare consensus sequences of aligned HOGs as well as de-novo assembled sequence contigs to nucleotide (NCBI NT) and protein (NCBI NR) reference archives in order to assign transcripts to a taxonomic origin. To this end, we employ several BLAST [58] search strategies (BLASTN, BLASTX, and TBLASTX) with sensitive word sizes (, , and, respectively). TBLASTX bypasses synonymous mutations during similarity search and is particularly suited for detecting functionally conserved homologs. This approach is therefore recommended for discovering remote similarities [65] and is widely used in environmental metagenomics [66]. A permissive E-value threshold of is used for all comparisons in order to reduce the possibility of missing true viral hits. For each query transcript and search strategy, the three highest-scoring reference sequences are extracted from the BLAST results. Subsequently, descriptions, taxonomic information, and available gene annotations for high-scoring reference hits are pooled and query transcripts are assigned a putative viral, human, or ambiguous origin based on the pooled information. In order to limit the search space of the computationally intensive TBLASTX procedure, we constrain the allowed taxonomic origin of reference sequences to only viral (NCBI taxon ID) or human (NCBI taxon ID) hits while excluding artificial sequences (NCBI taxon ID) using the NCBI database query “ ( ( (txid10239 [ORGN]) OR (txid9606 [ORGN]) OR (human [ORGN]) ) NOT (txid81077 [ORGN]) ) ”. We quantify the ability of our novel method Virana and the related methods RINS [45] and CaPSID [46] at detecting diverged viral transcripts among human sequence data by employing a recently published validation data set [46]. This data set consists of a negative control background set of reads simulated from the human reference genome that is spiked with four sets of reads simulated from viral reference genomes. Nucleotide positions within reads of each of the four viral spike-in data sets are mutated randomly independently and uniformly with a set-specific probability before being merged with the background data set. The set of viral reference sequences represents different viral families that infect plants (Cherry green ring mottle virus, Cestrum yellow leaf curling virus, Elm mottle virus, East African cassava mosaic virus), birds (Gallid herpesvirus 1), insects (Cotesia congregata bracovirus), bacteria (Guinea pig Chlamydia phage), amphibians (Frog adenovirus 1), and mammals (Rat coronavirus Parker, Banna virus). All five data sets (non-spiked human negative control and four human-viral spike-in sets) are analyzed by Virana, RINS, and CaPSID using identical reference sequences as described in Section “Reference genomes”. Sensitivity (fraction of correctly identified viral reads among all viral reads) and specificity (fraction of falsely identified human reads among all human reads) of viral read detection are determined for each method and data set. Analyses are performed with either default parameters (Virana), parameters published in the original validation data set (CaPSID), or settings adapted by us in order to maximize sensitivity (RINS: minimal contig length decreased to, read lengths and insert size distributions according to input data). Since all methods map to the same complete viral reference set, reads from a particular viral genome of the validation data set may be distributed across several closely related reference genomes, all of which may be considered valid mappings. For this reason, we added post-processing steps to CaPSID and RINS and performed this validation on the level of viral taxonomic families rather than on the level of single viral species. We note, however, that results of all tested methods including Virana retain information on single viral species throughout the analysis. In particular, sensitivity and specificity of the methods change only minimally if data is analyzed on the single species level. Analysis of the human-viral homologous regions and chimeric transcripts based on simulated read data (see Section “Simulated sequencing data”) was conducted by configuring CaPSID, RINS, and Virana analogous to the previous section. For the validation of fusion transcript detection, the number of true positives is set to the number of all reads originating from the human-viral fusion transcript. Since all detection methods in this validation are configured to only report reads mapping to the viral part of the fusion transcript, sensitivity estimates are scaled down equally for all methods in this particular validation. Analysis of discordant read ends in order to detect the origins of chimeric transcripts was performed as described before (see Section “Detection of chimeric transcripts”). Expanding on related work [34], [35], we quantify the theoretical sensitivity of Virana by estimating the number of viral transcripts per cell that are required for achieving a certain minimal sequencing coverage at a probability of at least 95%. Based on human genome annotations obtained from UCSC, we determined an average length of human coding sequences (CDS) of bp. By conservatively assuming that an idealized cell contains mRNAs [34] of average length fragmented at bp as a result of library preparation, an expected number of cDNA fragments are generated per cell. For a given viral transcript of length and a viral transcript abundance per cell, we expect a number of viral transcript fragments. Assuming a theoretical, unbiased sequencing process, the probability of sequencing a viral transcript fragment among the overall transcript fragments is. Given a single-end read length of, a number reads are required to achieve a sequence coverage of that viral transcript. The probability of observing at least reads during sequencing with a sequencing depth is specified by the cumulative binomial distribution function with parameters, and. Due to numerical instabilities of computing the cumulative binomial distribution for large values, we exploit the Central Limit Theorem and estimate by the Camp-Paulson normal approximation to the binomial distribution. This approach has a negligible approximation error of, where [67]. Our approach further depends on successfully reconstructed homologous regions, each requiring an empirically determined minimum number of transcripts separated by no more than base pairs. Although the probability of a homologous region being successfully constructed from viral transcripts at a given sequence coverage can be derived analytically for a special case [68], this solution neither considers edge effects occurring for small transcripts nor takes into account the distribution of insert sizes of paired-end reads. We therefore approach the problem empirically by in silico simulation of paired-end reads that are assigned randomly independently and uniformly to transcripts of different lengths and at varying coverages. This simulation process addresses the aforementioned confounding factors by considering transcript boundaries and sampling insert sizes from a normal distribution parametrized according to neuroblastoma sequence data employed in this study (see Section “Library preparation and sequencing”). An mean estimator for and its standard error were derived by averaging the success rates of homologous region constructions across simulations for each transcript length, read length, region linkage, and read coverage. All sequence data generated in this study are publicly available in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at study accession number PRJEB4441. Software implementations of our method and all validation procedures are available at http: //mpi-inf. mpg. de/∼sven/virana.
In order to compare Virana and the two subtractive approaches CaPSID and RINS in a controlled environment we rely on a previously published simulated data set consisting of a negative control data set free of viral reads, here denoted as background set. The background set is used to construct four additional validation data sets spiked with viral reads at increasing rates of sequence divergence (0%, 5%, 10%, 25%, see Materials and Methods). Performance is quantified in terms of sensitivity and specificity (see Materials and Methods). Applying all three viral detection methods on the validation data sets reveals comparatively high rates of correctly detected viral reads for CaPSID and RINS at low sequence divergences between 0% and 5%. Specifically, the two subtractive methods achieve fold higher sensitivities compared to Virana (sensitivities of versus for subtractive approaches and Virana, respectively, see Figure 2). In contrast, Virana substantially surpasses subtractive approaches at higher rates of viral sequence divergence (10–25%), offering comparatively stable sensitivities between -fold and -fold higher than Capsid and RINS, respectively (sensitivities of versus for subtractive approaches and Virana, respectively, see Figure 2, left panel). Notably, while subtractive approaches fail to identify 20–90% of viruses in settings of high sequence divergence, Virana is the only approach able to reliably detect the full set of viruses in all validation scenarios (see Figure 2, right panel). As a result of Virana' s ability to detect human-viral transcript homologs, reads originating from several human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) that are part of the human reference genome but technically also belong to the viral family Retroviridae are detected in validation data at all levels of sequence divergence. Since the detected HERV reads originate from the human rather than from the viral part of the validation data, these reads classified as false positive (FP) hits for the purpose of this validation. As a result of this artifact, Virana exhibits a slightly lowered specificity compared to subtractive approaches (0. 99985 versus 1. 0 for Virana and CaPSID/RINS, respectively). However, we note that HERV reads are correctly classified by Virana during homologous region construction and by optional BLAST-based taxonomic annotation. These reads can therefore be safely and automatically ignored in subsequent analyses if HERV expression is of no interest to the researcher. In spite of the involved construction process of homologous regions, Virana is fastest among the three viral detection approaches, requiring only about half an hour per sample analyzed. In contrast, RINS and CaPSID require two to times longer per sample, respectively (see Figure 3). Interestingly, the majority of time spend by CaPSID is lost on subtraction, indicating that this step is a limiting factor of subtractive approaches. We note than reported times are based on analyses using a single compute core. Since all evaluated methods benefit from multithreading, dedicating additional compute cores to the analysis allows for further reduction in processing time. Having established Virana' s ability to detect reads sampled at comparatively high coverage from viral genomes with low or no human-viral sequence similarity, we next test the sensitivity of the viral detection methods in a more challenging scenario involving gene regions of animal viruses that have close human homologs and are sampled at low sequencing coverages. Three such human-viral homologs are used in the analysis: V-ABL of the acutely transforming retrovirus A-MuLV, Bo17 of herpesvirus BoHV-4 (a model virus for oncogenic gammaherpesviruses such as EBV and KSHV and implied in several animal cancers [69]) and gag of HERV-K (HML2) 22I, a class of human endogenous retroviruses associated with some forms of breast cancer [70]). Validation is based on simulated sequencing data and split into two scenarios (see Materials and Methods for details). Within the first scenario, simulated sequencing reads are sampled directly from human-viral homologs while in the second scenario reads are generated from artificial fusion transcripts that each involve one of the three homologs fused to the human TP53 proto-oncogene. The resulting human-viral fusion transcripts mimic transcriptional signals indicating retroviral integration or homologous recombination of viral DNA next to a human gene which may result in activation of the latter by insertional mutagenesis. We apply the viral detection methods Virana, CaPSID, and RINS on these two validation data sets in order to evaluate sensitivity at detecting viral genes that are similar to human factors either due to natural sequence homology or due to gene fusions. Performance is quantified by detection sensitivity, specificity, as well as by the absolute number of reads correctly detected. While all methods performed at a perfect specificity of, only Virana detects viral transcripts at all coverages and with two to three-fold higher sensitivities compared to competing methods (Figure 4). In particular, sequence reads originating from endogenous retroviruses were almost always subtracted from the analysis by RINS and CaPSID. In addition, RINS seemed to be confounded by low sequencing coverage, a fact most probably resulting from its heavy reliance on de-novo transcript assembly. Subsequent analysis of discordantly mapped read pairs by Virana (see Materials and Methods) correctly identified the TP53 gene as fusion partner of both V-ABL and Bo17, indicating that detection of human-viral chimeras is reliable even at low twofold coverage. Due to the repeat nature of the HERV-K sequence in the human genome and the resulting re-occurrence of HERV-K homologs at multiple loci in the human reference it was not possible to unambiguously identify the fusion partner of the HERV-K gag gene. Due to a variety of factors (see Discussion) human tumor viruses often replicate at very low levels within the infected cell. Determining the required sequencing depth for detecting viral transcripts present at specific cellular abundances is therefore crucial for planning transcriptome experiments designed to identify tumor viruses. Based on statistical arguments and average mRNA sizes (see Materials and Methods), we inferred the minimal abundances of viral transcripts required in an average cell required for detection depending (1) on the length of the transcript being sought and (2) on the sequencing depth employed in the experiment. Here we report results for an average viral cDNA-transcript (bp), an average viral transcript region analyzed in the validation of human-viral homologs (Bo17 and vABL, bp, see previous section), an average length human CDS (bp), and the genome size of a small tumor virus (A-MuLV, bp). Based on these estimates and given an average sequencing depth as employed in the NB1 analysis panel, Virana requires a minimum twofold sequence coverage of an average viral cDNA transcript in order to detect the transcript within a homologous region with % probability (Figure 5, upper left quadrant, dashed blue vertical line). This sequence coverage is produced with % probability if at least one viral transcript is present per cell, on average (Figure 6, upper left quadrant, dashed blue vertical line). The number of viral transcripts per cell required for detection is inversely related to transcript length and sequencing depth, in principle: at a transcript length corresponding to a small viral genome (bp) and a per-sample sequencing depth of % of the sequencing depth generated in the NB1 panel, a transcript coverage of and at least viral transcripts per cell are required for reliable detection (Figure 6, upper right panel, dotted black vertical line). In order to evaluate Virana on experimental data we conducted an analysis of several positive and negative control samples with a cumulative size of Gbp. The negative control sequencing data originates from a normal brain transcriptome that is suitable as a control for neuroblastoma data. Positive controls span a range of cancer transcriptomes that are associated with several viral cofactors such as a hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell line with proviral integration of Hepatitis B virus, a cervical squamous cell carcinoma (ceSCC) and two HeLa cell line samples with associated human papillomavirus (HPV), and a Ebstein-Barr virus (EBV) positive B-cell lymphoma (BCL). As displayed in Figure 7 (upper part), analysis of the brain negative control sample demonstrates that viral transcription is ubiquitous even in normal (non-cancerous) samples. Specifically, several bacteriophages of the taxonomic families Microvirodae, Myoviridae, Podoviridae, and Siphovoridae indicate sample contamination with bacteria as well as technical spike-ins (http: //res. illumina. com/documents/products/technotes/technote_phixcontrolv3. pdf). Remarkably, the Coliphage phi-X174 genome of the family Microvirodae could be fully assembled by Virana' s homologous region construction, yielding a single fragment of 99% sequence identity and 100% coverage compared to the phi-x174 reference genome. In addition, several retroviral and flaviviral hits at low abundances of reads per million reads mapped (RPMM) highlight human factors such as HERV-Ks (endogenous retroviruses) as well as human proto-oncogenes SRC/ABL and DNAJC14/RP11 that have close homologs in the viral families Retroviridae and Flaviviridae, respectively. The taxonomic ambiguity of these regions is automatically identified during Virana' s homologous region construction and confirmed by optional BLAST-based annotation compared to NCBI nt and nr databases (as indicated by thinner bars in Figure 7). Analysis of positive control samples resulted in homologous regions (HORs) spanning five viral families (see Figure 7, lower part). Viral cofactors associated with each of the cancer samples are correctly recovered at a high dynamic range of read abundances between RPMM (HCC with integrated HBV provirus) and RPMM (HeLa cell line associated with HPV18). In addition, several viral fragments were successfully reconstructed within HORs of the positive control samples, such as a bp long EBV segment containing latency-associated factors EBNA 3b, 3c, and 4a (80% sequence identity with the wild type genome) as well as a bp long HBV fragment containing the oncogenic HBV-X gene (98% sequence identity compared with Hepatitis B virus isolate HK1476). Similar to results on the negative control brain sample, several HORs with lower abundances assigned to the taxonomic families Retroviridae and Flaviviridae represent human-viral sequence homologies that are automatically flagged to be of ambiguous taxonomic status by Virana. Interestingly, the HCC sample was also investigated in recent work focusing on detecting viral integration events [52]. In this recent study, the authors confirmed one integration event by Sanger sequencing while alluding to two additional events still awaiting experimental validation. By analyzing discordantly mapped read ends, Virana could correctly identify all three HBV fusion events involving human genes TRRAP (11 read pairs), ZNF48 (11 read pairs), and PLB1 (6 read pairs) as part of the primary mapping procedure. Deep-sequencing of neuroblastoma samples on two sequencing platforms yielded Gbp (NB1) and Gbp (NB2) of mapped read pairs (including multimaps), respectively (see Table 2). While samples were sequenced independently and marked with unique identifiers to allow for sample tracking at each step of the analysis, reads from each sample panel and each tumor stage (4 or 4S) were pooled for analysis. Processing the pooled sample panels with Virana resulted in homologous regions representing four viral families (see Figure 8). All HORs were associated with low relative read abundances of RPMM compared to confirmed viral signatures of experimental positive controls (RPMM, see Figure 7). Several homologous regions assigned to bacteriophage viral families Baculoviridae and Myoviridae are attributable to sample contamination. Reads assigned to viral families Retroviridae and Flaviviridae were determined to originate from either endogenous elements (HERVs) or from human proto-oncogenes that have close homologs in pestiviruses and acutely transforming retroviruses. HORs associated with these viral families were automatically assigned human or ambiguous taxonomic origin by Virana, as indicated by narrower bars in Figure 8. We undertook manual investigation of homologous relationships within each ambiguous HOR by analyzing multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees of the respective regions. These analyses revealed unambiguous clusterings of neuroblastoma sequence reads near human or endogenous factors in all cases (see Figure 9 for an example phylogeny). No significant differences in viral expression signatures between neuroblastoma 4 and 4S stages could be detected except for HERV-K endogenous retroviruses which display higher abundances in stage 4S (NB1: 56 RPMM, NB2: 28 RPMM) than in stage 4 (NB1: 41 RPMM, NB2: 15 RPMM) neuroblastomas. All reads assigned to homologous regions were further analyzed for evidence of chimeric transcription (see Materials and Methods). While several read pairs with putative chimeric mappings could be identified, all viral chimeric read ends were clustered within low-complexity regions of the viral genomes. Analyses revealed that these putative chimeric mappings represent sequencing errors and low-complexity templates that non-specifically attracted reads of similarly low sequence complexity. No cluster of chimeric reads located at a specifically viral genome location and representing a human-viral breakpoint could be identified. In order to identify transcripts of novel viruses that do not map to known references, we generated de-novo transcriptome assemblies of all unmapped reads. We applied the two de Bruijn graph based assembly methods Oases[61] and Trinity[60] that demonstrated best-in-class performance in recent evaluations [71] on sequencing data of the NB2 panel. This sequencing data is especially amenable to assembly due to its long read length (see Table 1). Assembly resulted in and reconstructed neuroblastoma 4S contigs for Oases, and Trinity, respectively (see Figure 10). Assembly of the neuroblastoma 4 sample yielded and contigs from the same methods. Results of Oases and Trinity assemblies are comparable in terms of contig length. All contigs were subjected to taxonomic annotation using high-sensitivity TBLASTX annotation based on human and viral content of the NCBI nt and nr databases (see Materials and Methods). Overall, contigs (of contigs of any specific assembly) were identified to be of putative viral origin. contigs were assigned to bacteriophage references and excluded from further analysis. Based on searches against the full NCBI nr and nt databases followed by manual inspection, all remaining contigs were determined to display higher similarities to bacterial or human sequences than to any viral reference.
Neuroblastoma is a pediatric tumor of the sympathetic nervous system that represents the most common form of cancer in infancy. It is characterized by a striking diversity in biology and clinical behaviour of its subtypes. This heterogeneity as well as supporting epidemiological findings are highly suggestive of infectious cofactors involved in genesis and maintenance of the disease [19], [20]. While several studies utilizing technologies with lower sensitivity compared to our approach have identified human polyomaviruses in neuroblastoma and pediatric embryonal tumors [22]–[24], newer investigations seem to render these associations inconclusive [25]. However, viral commensals of the families polyomaviridae and adenoviridae are indeed suspected to acquire rare transforming properties as a consequence of viral latency or defective replication [72] and to encode oncogenes [73], [74] whose carcinogenic potential in human is currently investigated [8], [75]. We undertook the first systematic search for known and unknown viruses in transcriptomes of metastatic neuroblastoma by analyzing deep sequencing RNA-Seq data of metastatic neuroblastomas from two tumor stages as well as positive and negative experimental controls. Several high-throughput methods for detecting viral sequence reads among human RNA-Seq data have been developed. Among these methods, PathSeq, CaPSID and RINS are most prominent due to their design as reusable computational pipelines. In this study we selected CaPSID and RINS due to their high performance and public availability and compared their detection performance with that of our novel method Virana. Both CaPSID and RINS follow a subtractive approach, e. g. they separately map input data to viral and human reference sequences and subtract viral read mappings that are similar to the human genome from the analysis. While CaPSID is conceptualised as a generalised framework that supports the subtraction process by means of a database and a web server, RINS features an integrated pipeline that splits input reads into shorter fragments in order to increase mapping sensitivity, followed by transcriptome assembly of putative viral reads into full length transcripts. Both RNA and DNA viruses may share considerable sequence homology to human factors due to reasons such as lateral gene transfer, oncogene capture, ancestral endogenization, or insertional mutagenesis leading to chimeric transcripts [47]. Such homologous transcripts may display human-viral sequence similarities of 86% (Bovine Herpes virus) and up to 92% (acutely transforming retroviruses). Subtractive approaches silently discard these transcript from the analysis due to their similarity to the human reference genome. In contrast, our novel method Virana follows a radically different approach. Instead of separate mapping to viral and human reference database followed by digital subtraction, Virana undertakes a particularly sensitive read mapping to a combined set of human and viral references. By allowing for multimaps, this mapping strategy facilitates discovery of viral transcripts regardless of their similarity to human factors. Apart from being conceptually simpler by relying on only one mapping step and discarding the subtraction procedure that is both possibly erroneous and computationally costly, this approach empowers the mapper to make informed decisions about relative alignment quality by weighing different human and viral reference positions against each other. As a direct consequence of this increased mapping quality, paired-end reads can be mapped across human and viral references, allowing for detection of human-viral chimeric transcription and proviral integration events. We quantitatively validated Virana' s approach both in settings involving simulated reads as well as in real-world scenarios involving experimental positive and negative controls. In these validations, Virana displays significantly higher detection sensitivities than competing approaches especially at high rates of viral sequence divergence exceeding % that are common for tumor viruses [76]–[78]. As a consequence, Virana was the only method able to detect all viral families independent of sequence divergence in the validation data set. In spite of the additional processing undertaken by our method, Virana features between and two and three times faster execution speeds compared to related methods. Interestingly, viral reads analyzed in the sequence divergence validation originate from a broad array of viral species, only two of which infect mammalian hosts and none of which display significant human-viral sequence homology. As a consequence, this validation favors subtractive approaches by reducing the danger of erroneous subtraction of viral reads that are similar to the human genome. In addition, the sequence divergence validation contained reads sampled at high coverage. However, transcripts of tumor viruses are often expressed at only low cellular abundances and are thus expected to have low sequence coverage. We therefore next validated the ability of viral detection approaches to detect viral transcripts homologous to human factors at varying levels of sequence coverage. Virana, by virtue of not relying on digital subtraction, demonstrated superior sensitivity at this validation both in settings of natural sequence homology as well as in cases of human-viral chimeric transcription. Specifically, Virana was the only method able to detect evidence for all viruses even at low twofold coverages. We observed that both RINS and CaPSID discarded a substantial amount of human-viral homologous transcripts due to their high similarity to the human reference genome, a fact that explains the lower performance of these methods in this validation scenario. Analysis of positive and negative experimental controls further reveals that Virana is able to detect viral transcripts associated with four types of cancer at a high dynamic range of relative abundances. While Virana displays a slightly reduced specificity in simulated and experimental evaluations, these false positive hits are limited to only two viral families (Flaviviridae and Retroviridae) that display high sequence similarity to human factors. These hits are additionally annotated with an ambiguous taxonomic origin by Virana. In addition, Virana provides extensive support for investigating such ambiguous viral hits by analyzing the homologous context of putative viral reads in a context of multiple sequence alignments and phylogenies. In principle, several biological confounding factors may hinder detection of viral transcripts by any sequence-based method. Low concentration and extratumoral location of viral producer cells [8] or selection of growth-autonomous cells in progressed tumors [79] can significantly dilute the number of viral transcripts in a sample. Additionally, known tumor viruses such as high-risk HPV strains, EBV, and MCPyV selectively transcribe their genome during viral latency (HPV: E6/7 [80], [81], EBV: EBNA1/2 [82]–[84], MCPyV: large T antigen [31], [85]), thus generating only low abundances of tens (MCPyV [31]) to hundreds (KSHV [86], EBV [87]) of transcripts per cell. Last, transcription of human oncogenic factors modulated by viral [88] or endogenous [89], [90] retroviral promoters as well as ‘hit-and-run’ mechanisms of viral oncogenesis that imply loss of viral material [91], [92] may predispose cells to transformation without requiring maintenance of viral transcripts. Our approach aims to counteract these confounding factors by two strategies: first by sequencing neuroblastoma transcriptomes at comparatively high depth in order to detect rare transcripts and second by using several biological replicates at different tumor stages, thus reducing the probability of total loss of viral material from all analyzed samples. Based on statistical estimations concerning Virana' s homologous region construction process and the sequencing depth of our experimental data, we can conclude that our approach requires minimal abundances of only two average-length viral transcripts per cell even under adverse conditions such as high viral divergence or extensive human-viral sequence homology. While representing a theoretical sensitivity that may be altered by sequencing biases [93], these copy numbers compare very favorably with related estimates reporting minimal abundances of one to several complete viral genomes per cell [27], . After applying Virana to several positive control panels of human cancers with known viral cofactors and accurately reconstructing large fragments of viruses that are causally related to the respective tumors, we analyzed neuroblastoma transcriptomes at high sequencing depth and using two different sequencing platforms. Analyses of neuroblastoma transcriptomes resulted in the detection of putative viral transcripts with high local sequence similarity to several viral families. However, automatic taxonomic annotation as well as detailed manual inspection of homologous regions pertaining to these families revealed the human or bacteriophage origin of all transcripts. While we could find differences in the abundance of HERV-K transcripts between neuroblastoma stages 4 and 4S, the causative role of HERV transcription with regard to oncogenesis is currently unclear [94] and, as to our knowledge, only tentative associations with specific cancers have been made as to date [70]. Apart from these tentative differences in HERV-K abundances, no quantitative difference between neuroblastoma stages 4 and 4S could be identified with regard to viral transcription. In conclusion, our observations provide negative evidence regarding the contested question of putative viral cofactors of metastatic neuroblastoma by suggesting that viruses are unlikely to be frequent cofactors in the maintenance of metastatic neuroblastoma.
Many human cancers are caused by infections with tumor viruses and identification of these pathogens is considered a critical contribution to cancer prevention. Deep sequencing enables us to systematically investigate viral nucleotide signatures in order to either verify or exclude the existence of viruses in idiopathic human cancers. We have developed Virana, a novel computational approach for identifying tumor viruses in human cancers that is applicable to a wide variety of tumors and viruses. Virana firstly addresses several important biological confounding factors that may hinder successful detection of these pathogens. We applied our approach in the first systematic search for cancer-causing viruses in metastatic neuroblastoma, the most common form of cancer in infancy. Although the heterogeneous clinical progression of this disease as well as epidemiological and virological findings are suggestive of a pathogenic cofactor, the viral etiology of neuroblastoma is currently contested. We conducted an analysis of experimental controls, comparisons with related approaches, as well as statistical analyses in order to validate our method. In spite of the high sensitivity of our approach, analyses of neuroblastoma transcriptomes did not provide evidence for the existence of any known or unknown human viruses. Our results therefore suggest that frequent viral cofactors of metastatic neuroblastoma are unlikely.
Sensitive Detection of Viral Transcripts in Human Tumor Transcriptomes