Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Welcome to the Taylor Lab!
The Taylor Lab focuses on aneuploidy signaling in cancer.
The goal of the Taylor lab is to understand the role of aneuploidy, whole chromosome or chromosome arm imbalance, in the development of cancer. Using functional genomics, genome engineering methods, and analysis of patient genomic data, we study the effects of aneuploidy on signaling and cell fate.
Our work spans across many cancer types, with a particular interest in chromosome 3 arm aneuploidies in squamous cancers. In collaboration with labs at Columbia and NYC, as well as community partners, we also want to ensure that our research addresses cancer disparities.
Developing computational algorithms and genome engineering approaches to uncover patterns and selective pressures driving aneuploidy in cancer
Chromosome arm aneuploidies are the most frequent genomic event in cancer! In recent work in collaboration with Rameen Beroukhim’s lab at DFCI (Shih et al., 2023 Nature), we developed an algorithm to identify peaks of positive and negative selection driving these events.
We also developed a CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering approach to delete chromosome arm 3p in human immortalized lung epithelial cells (Taylor et al., 2018 Cancer Cell) which can be applied to any chromosome arm. We are also taking a sliding window approach to identify regions of chromosome 3p that are important for deletion phenotypes.
Tissue-specific effects of aneuploidy
Aneuploidy occurs in tissue-specific patterns (see figure from Taylor et al., 2018).
Our lab studies:
How chr3p deletion and chr3q gain affect squamous differentiation (see organoid figure below!)
The consequences of chr3p deletion in different cell types
The interaction between HPV infection and aneuploidy
Pathways and vulnerabilities induced by specific aneuploidies
Individual aneuploid events correlate with signaling changes in many pathways, ranging from immune signaling to apoptosis and proliferation. These events also induce specific vulnerabilities. The Taylor lab has identified genetic vulnerabilities in cells with chr3p deletion and chr3q gain, with mechanistic validation ongoing.
Impact of ancestry on aneuploidy and translating to the clinic
In ancestry-specific analysis of TCGA data of lung squamous cell carcinoma, we found that chr8q and chr8q24.21 (which contains a MYC enhancer) are more frequently amplified in tumors from patients with African ancestry (Jain et al., under review). We are also exploring how specific aneuploidies may effect treatment response.
