Systematic Evaluation of Somatic Cis-Regulatory Mutations in Follicular Lymphoma

Follicular lymphoma (FL) is an incurable indolent B cell malignancy characterized in the majority of cases by the t(14;18) translocation. While the mutational landscape of the coding genome is nearing completion, less is known about the characteristics of its noncoding genome. Our expectation is that the distribution of noncoding mutations will be non-random, determined by epigenomics features, such as chromatin modification and accessibility. Our strategy is therefore to integrate whole genome epigenomic marks and mutations in order to enrich for variants with regulatory potential and identify unique mutational processes specific to thesecis-regulatory elements (CREs).Allele-specific expression (ASE) patterns allow further refinement to resolve functional CREs and bona fide mutations associated with changes in gene expression.