Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells divide uncontrollably and destroy body tissue, and currently plagues today’s world. Carcinomas are cancers derived from epithelial cells and include breast and prostate cancer. Breast cancer is a type of carcinoma that forms in breast tissue cells. The tumor cells can be further categorized after testing the cells for the presence of certain molecules. Hormone receptor positive breast cancer includes the tumor cells with receptors that respond to the steroid hormones, estrogen and progesterone, or the peptide hormone, HER2. These forms of cancer respond well to chemotherapy and endocrine therapy. On the other hand, triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is characterized by the lack of hormone receptor expression and tends to have a worse prognosis in women. Prostate cancer forms in the cells of the prostate gland and has been attributed to mutations in androgen receptor ligand specificity. In a subset of triple negative breast cancer, genetic expression profiling has found a luminal androgen receptor that is dependent on androgen signaling. TNBC has also been found to respond well to enzalutamide, a an androgen receptor inhibitor. As the gene of the androgen receptor, AR, is located on the X chromosome and expressed in a variety of tissues, the responsiveness of TNBC to androgen receptor inhibition could be due to the differential usage of isoforms - different gene mRNA transcripts that produce different proteins. Thus, this study analyzed differential gene expression and differential isoform usage between TNBC cancers – that do and do not express the androgen receptor – and prostate cancer in order to better understand the underlying mechanism behind the effectiveness of androgen receptor inhibition in TNBC. Through the analysis of differential gene expression between the TNBC AR+ and AR- conditions, it was found that seven genes are significantly differentially expressed between the two types of tissues. Genes of significance are AR and EN1, which was found to be a potential prognostic marker in a subtype of TNBC. While some genes are differentially expressed between the TNBC AR+ and AR- tissues, the differences in isoform expression between the two tissues do not reflect the difference in gene expression. We discovered 11 genes that exhibited significant isoform switching between AR+ and AR- TNBC and have been found to contribute to cancer characteristics. The genes CLIC1 and RGS5 have been found to help the rapid, uncontrolled growth of cancer cells. HSD11B2, IRAK1, and COL1Al have been found to contribute to general cancer characteristics and metastasis in breast cancer. PSMA7 has been found to play a role in androgen receptor activation. Finally, SIDT1 and GLYATL1 are both associated with breast and prostate cancers. Overall, through the analysis of differential isoform usage between AR+ and AR- samples, we uncovered differences that were not detected by a gene level differential expression analysis. Thus, future work will focus on analyzing differential gene and isoform expression across all types of breast cancer and prostate cancer to better understand the responsiveness of TNBC to androgen receptor inhibition.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a type of liver cancer common in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asian countries. Each year more than 700,000 new cases and more than 600,000 deaths are recorded worldwide due to HCC. According to the American Cancer Society HCC is ranked the 5th most common cancer worldwide with a male:female susceptibility ratio ranging between 2:1 and 8:1. HCC risk factors include lifestyle behaviors, such as persistent alcohol abuse and smoking, prolonged exposure to aflatoxins, chronic viral hepatitis infections, inherited metabolic diseases and non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases. To understand the genetic effects underlying sex-bias in HCC, it is necessary to include the sex chromosomes in genomics analyses. X and Y chromosomes are often discluded in genomics studies because of the technical and analytical challenges: sequence homology. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the effects of sex chromosome complement aware read mapping to germline variant calling. 10 male and 10 female tumor adjacent samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma (TCGA LIHC) cohort were processed using sex-aware and default reference and the concordance of the two approaches was examined. We detected a higher disconcordance of 0.69% on variants called on the X chromosome and a disconcordance of 0.51% on variants called on the Y chromosomes for the reference and alternative alleles respectively compared to autosomes. Variants called on the REF/ALT genotypes had a disconcordances of 1.00%, 1.05%, 1.35% and 12.34% for the autosomes, chromosome 7, the X, and the Y chromosome, respectively. At the end of the project we concluded that the generated datasets showed the effect of sex-aware read mapping on variant calling. Though the data did not show the sites that can be called as variants in one dataset but not in the other, rather the concordance looked at sites that were called as variants in both data sets.