Virus expression detection reveals RNA-sequencing contamination in TCGA.
Sara R SelitskyDavid MarronDaniel HollernLisle E MoseKatherine A HoadleyCorbin JonesJoel S ParkerDirk P DittmerCharles M PerouPublished in: BMC genomics (2020)
Altogether, this indicates a multi-step contamination process. First, MCF-7 was infected with an XMRV. Second, this infected cell line was added to a pool of cell lines, which contained HeLa. Finally, RNA from this pool of cell lines contaminated several TCGA tumor samples most-likely during library construction. Thus, these human tumors with H-HPV or XMRV reads were likely not infected with H-HPV 18 or XMRV.