A pseudogene of WDR5 is differentially expressed in brain metastatic breast cancer.
Metastasis to the brain is a clinical problem in patients with breast cancer (1-3). We mined published microarray data (4, 5) to compare primary and metastatic tumor transcriptomes for the discovery of genes associated with brain metastasis in humans with metastatic breast cancer. We found that a non-coding RNA transcribed from the WDR5 locus (WDR5p), a pseudogene transcript, was among the transcripts whose quantity was most significantly different in the brain metastases of patients with metastatic breast cancer. WDR5p transcript was present at increased quantities in brain metastatic tissues as compared to primary tumors of the breast. Modulation of WDR5p expression may be relevant to the biology by which tumor cells metastasize from the breast to the brain in humans with metastatic breast cancer.