FigureĀ 2.
lncRNA prioritization scheme and results. (A) The lncRNA prioritization scheme integrating results from the CRISPR-Cas9 screens, prognostic relevance of lncRNAs and their differential expression (DE) in patients with MM contrasted to normal tissues, from publicly available data sets. (B) CRISPR-Cas9 depletion log fold change (logFC) of individual nontargeting pgRNAs and pgRNAs targeting the top-priority hit RP11-350G8.5, across the 2 screens. The pgRNAs selected and used for the follow-up experimental validations are reported in red. (C) Association between high basal expression of RP11-350G8.5 and poorer overall (OS)/progression-free survival (PFS) in patients with MM (from the MMRF/coMMpass study). Reported P values are from a Cox proportional hazards regression model and from a Kaplan-Meier log-rank test performed across a partition induced by the best discriminating patient-percentile threshold of RP11-350G8.5 expression (40% and 31%, respectively, for OS and PFS), which was determined in a supervised manner, for visualization purposes. (D) Basal expression comparison for RP11-350G8.5 across patients with MM, normal tissues, healthy bone marrow, and plasma cells. In the prioritization pipeline, DE is computed via a generalized linear model. Here, for visualization purposes, a Student t test has been performed across groups and resulting P values are reported. (E) High-priority oncogenic lncRNAs outputted by the prioritization pipeline. Each point is an lncRNA with coordinates on the 2 axes indicating, respectively, best scaled -log transformed P values from 2 DE analyses comparing patients with MM with normal samples (x-axis), and priority scores (y-axis). Shapes indicate the cell line in which the lncRNAs were found significantly essential, according to the screen; color intensities are proportional to the best P value from OS/PSF based on the lncRNA expression observed in patients with MM. (F) Comparison of basal expression of RP11-350G8.5 (IL-6R-AS1) and its antisense gene (IL-6R) showing only a mild significant positive correlation between sense and antisense genes in each group of patients across groups of patients with MM segmented on the basis of their response to bortezomib treatment.