Variation of extrachromosomal circular DNA in cancer cell lines

The presence of oncogene carrying eccDNAs is strongly associated with carcinogenesis and poor patient survival. Tumour biopsies and in vitro cancer cell lines are frequently utilized as models to investigate the role of eccDNA in cancer. However, eccDNAs are often lost during the in vitro growth of cancer cell lines, questioning the reproducibility of studies utilizing cancer cell line models. Here, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of eccDNA variability in seven cancer cell lines (MCA3D, PDV, HaCa4, CarC, MIA-PaCa-2, AsPC-1, and PC-3). We compared the content of unique eccDNAs between triplicates of each cell line and found that the number of unique eccDNA is specific to each cell line, while the eccDNA sequence content varied greatly among triplicates (∼ 0–1% eccDNA coordinate commonality). In the PC-3 cell line, we found that the large eccDNA (ecDNA) with MYC is present in high-copy number in an NCI cell line isolate but not present in ATCC isolates. Together, these results reveal that the sequence content of eccDNA is highly variable in cancer cell lines. This highlights the importance of testing cancer cell lines before use, and to enrich for subclones in cell lines with the desired eccDNA to get relatively pure population for studying the role of eccDNA in cancer.