Distinguishing preferences of human APOBEC3A and APOBEC3B for cytosines in hairpin loops, and reflection of these preferences in APOBEC-signature cancer genome mutations.

The APOBEC3 enzymes convert cytosines in single-stranded DNA to uracils to protect against viruses and retrotransposons but can contribute to mutations that diversify tumors. To understand the mechanism of mutagenesis, we map the uracils resulting from expression of APOBEC3B or its catalytic carboxy-terminal domain (CTD) in Escherichia coli. Like APOBEC3A, the uracilomes of A3B and A3B-CTD show a preference to deaminate cytosines near transcription start sites and the lagging-strand replication templates and in hairpin loops. Both biochemical activities of the enzymes and genomic uracil distribution show that A3A prefers 3 nt loops the best, while A3B prefers 4 nt loops. Reanalysis of hairpin loop mutations in human tumors finds intrinsic characteristics of both the enzymes, with a much stronger contribution from A3A. We apply Hairpin Signatures 1 and 2, which define A3A and A3B preferences respectively and are orthogonal to published methods, to evaluate their contribution to human tumor mutations.