Put three descriptions of the same address on one hg38 axis - the exon-11 CTCF site, the intron-10/exon-11 functional cut point, and the region that breaks more in patients who got a KMT2A fusion - and find out whether they are one element
also called the exon-11 coordinate check · are the CTCF site, the cut point and the break-prone window the same base pairs?
Three separate papers describe something interesting at roughly the same spot in the KMT2A gene, but each uses a different way of naming the position, so nobody knows whether they mean one spot or three nearby spots. Putting all three on the same genomic ruler is an afternoon's work and would either produce a striking coincidence or dissolve one.
The same thing, for a scientist
Three findings in this graph land on approximately the same part of the *KMT2A* breakpoint cluster region, each expressed in a different coordinate language: **(1)** a conserved CTCF occupancy site in *KMT2A* **exon 11** whose occupancy gates locus amplification and rearrangement, with **no coordinates published** [E1]; **(2)** the **intron-10/exon-11 boundary**, named as the BCR's *functional cut point* because exons 11-16 encode the PHD1-PHD2-ePHD3 cluster whose inclusion is incompatible with transformation, and as the B/C subregion boundary with 39.5% of patient breaks in subregion C [E2]; **(3)** **hg38 chr11:118,488,500-800**, a 300 bp window 2- to 10-fold more break-prone in KMT2A-rearranged AML patients' own normal remission cells than in non-fusion patients' [E3]. **The graph currently holds all three and connects none of them**, and the connection is blocked on nothing more than a coordinate conversion. **The complication that makes it worth doing carefully: this graph holds three different exon-numbering conventions for the same 8.3 kb interval** - intron 7 to exon 13 (DCAL), exons 5-11 (historic), and exons 8-14 (PMID 37788669) - so 'exon 11' does not unambiguously identify a position across sources, and reconciling them by eye is exactly how a coordinate error enters a corpus [E4].
The procedure, and what each outcome means
Step 1 - fix a single reference frame. hg38, KMT2A on the plus strand at 11q23.3. Take the canonical transcript's exon coordinates from Ensembl or RefSeq and record the accession and version. Do not use exon numbers from any of the three sources as input; use them only to locate candidate intervals, and record which convention each source used.
Step 2 - place the three claims.
| claim | how to place it |
|---|---|
| the CTCF site | call the CTCF peak from the four CTCF ChIP-seq samples in GSE210480 and take its summit; this is the only route, because no publication gives coordinates |
| the functional cut point | the intron-10/exon-11 junction of the chosen transcript, in the DCAL convention used by breakpoint-kmt2a-major-bcr, mapped to hg38 |
| the break-prone window | chr11:118,488,500-800 as published, checked for build (the source says hg38) |
Step 3 - report distances, not a verdict. Base-pair distance from the CTCF summit to the cut-point junction, and to the midpoint and edges of the 300 bp window. Report the width of the CTCF peak and of subregion C (5,026 bp) alongside, so a reader can judge whether 'the same element' is a claim or a resolution artefact.
Pre-registered readings.
- All three within ~500 bp. The boundary that decides whether a break is oncogenic is also the element whose chromatin state decides whether the break happens, and is also the place that breaks more in people who went on to develop the disease. That is a finding, and it makes the element the single most important 300 bp in this graph's genesis model.
- The CTCF summit and the cut point coincide, the patient window does not. The molecular convergence stands and the patient-level link is dropped. Still worth the entry.
- They are scattered across subregion C. The convergence was an artefact of a 5 kb window and three coordinate conventions, and
genome-kmt2a-exon-11-ctcf-siteshould be rewritten to say so. This outcome is the most likely one and the entry must be written to survive it.
Why this is an analysis and not a footnote
Because the graph has already made this class of error in the other direction. docs/QUEEN_BRIEF.md records a case where an Ensembl id resolved to the wrong gene and two plausible PMIDs turned out to be unrelated papers - identifier errors that survived because nothing forced them onto a common frame. An exon number is an identifier, and this beat found three mutually inconsistent conventions for one interval in this corpus's own entries, none of them wrong and all of them unlabelled at the point of use.
And a second reason, which is the one that matters scientifically. If the three do coincide, the coincidence supplies a mechanism for something this graph already holds as an unexplained observation: breakpoint-kmt2a-bcr-architecture records that de novo breakpoints skew centromeric within the BCR and therapy-related breakpoints skew telomeric into the SAR/TOP2-rich half (P = 0.02), inferring 'different initiating mechanisms for the two aetiologies'. The therapy-related mechanism in this beat acts at a specific element. Which half of the BCR that element sits in is a direct test, and it is answered by the same coordinate work.
| script | analyses/kmt2a-bcr-ctcf-coordinate-overlap/run.py |
|---|---|
| status | run |
| secondary test | breakpoint-kmt2a-bcr-architecture records de novo breakpoints skewed CENTROMERIC and therapy-related breakpoints skewed TELOMERIC within the BCR (P = 0.02), inferring different initiating mechanisms. The mechanism in this beat is a therapy-related one acting at a specific element, so which half that element sits in is a direct test - answered by the same coordinate work. |
| cost tier | low |
| timeline | an afternoon for the coordinates once the CTCF peak is called; a day with the peak calling |
| absence class | measured-not-analysed |
| run date | 2026-09-22 |
| run by | Q105; every coordinate and all three bp identities re-derived by the king |
inputs
[ "GSE210480 - the 4 CTCF ChIP-seq samples plus matched inputs (Homo sapiens, RPE); the ONLY route to a coordinate for the exon-11 CTCF site", "hg38 KMT2A exon coordinates from a named, versioned Ensembl or RefSeq transcript", "hg38 chr11:118,488,500-800 (PMID 34405474, build to be reconfirmed from the paper)", "the DCAL exon convention's transcript basis, to be established" ]
outputs required
[ "the hg38 coordinate of the exon-11 CTCF peak summit and the peak width", "base-pair distance from that summit to the intron-10/exon-11 junction", "base-pair distance from that summit to the midpoint and both edges of chr11:118,488,500-800", "which HALF of the BCR the site sits in - centromeric (de novo-skewed) or telomeric (t-AML-skewed)", "a table of the three exon conventions against the chosen transcript, so the corpus has one" ]
pre registered readings
{
"all_three_within_~500bp": "one element. The boundary deciding whether a break is oncogenic is also the element whose chromatin state decides whether it happens and the region that breaks more in people who developed the disease - the most important 300 bp in this graph's genesis model.",
"ctcf_and_cut_point_coincide_but_not_the_patient_window": "the molecular convergence stands; the patient-level link is dropped.",
"scattered_across_subregion_C": "the convergence was an artefact of a 5 kb window and three coordinate conventions. THIS IS THE MOST LIKELY OUTCOME and genome-kmt2a-exon-11-ctcf-site must be rewritten to say so."
}failure modes
[ "BUILD MISMATCH - the commonest way this class of analysis fails silently. Reconfirm the build of every coordinate from its own source, and state it.", "transcript choice - exon numbering depends on the transcript, and the DCAL convention's basis is not recorded in this graph", "CONTAINMENT REPORTED AS COINCIDENCE - subregion C is 5,026 bp wide, so 'in subregion C' is not 'at the cut point'. Report distances in base pairs, never containment.", "the CTCF peak summit is a peak in RPE cells; it may not be where CTCF sits in a haematopoietic cell" ]
outcome
{
"headline": "NONE of the three pre-registered readings occurred, and the result is the MIRROR IMAGE of reading 2. Reading 2 expected the CTCF site and the functional cut point to coincide while the patient window did not. The opposite is true: the patient window and the CTCF site are ONE element, and the cut point is the outlier.",
"the_measurements": {
"canonical exon 11 (ENST00000534358, GRCh38)": "chr11:118,488,614-118,488,760, 147 bp",
"Atkin patient break window (PMID 34405474)": "chr11:118,488,500-800 - CONTAINS all 147 bp of canonical exon 11",
"ENCODE CTCF+RAD21+SMC3 cluster": "chr11:118,488,159-118,489,206 - contains both of the above",
"DCAL functional cut point (canonical intron 9/exon 10)": "chr11:118,484,861|118,484,862",
"distance, cut point to canonical exon 11 start": "3,752 bp",
"distance, cut point to the CTCF anchor's near edge": "3,297 bp"
},
"most_likely_outcome_did_not_occur": "The pre-registered MOST LIKELY reading was 'scattered across subregion C - the convergence was an artefact of a 5 kb window and three coordinate conventions'. It is wrong in both directions at once: two of the three features are not scattered but identical, and the third is not scattered either, it is cleanly and measurably 3.7 kb away. The conventions WERE the problem, but they had concealed a real coincidence as well as manufacturing a false one.",
"secondary_test_answered": "AFFIRMATIVE. The element sits at 70.4% along the Broeker BCR, in the telomeric, t-AML-skewed half (75% versus 26%), and inside DCAL subregion C which holds 39.5% of 3,401 breakpoints. This is the prediction breakpoint-kmt2a-bcr-architecture's aetiology skew implies for a therapy-related mechanism, and it holds.",
"the_deliverable_that_was_asked_for": "The table of exon conventions against one transcript now exists as a registry row: DCAL = Ensembl canonical + 1, on three exact bp identities (canonical e8+i8 = 74+1,687 = 1,761 matching Meyer 'exon 9 - intron 9 = 1761'; canonical e9+i9 = 132+547 = 679 matching 'exon 10 - intron 10 = 679'; canonical e10 start to e12 end = 5,026 matching 'exon 11 ... exon 13 = 5026'). A FOURTH convention was found and is deliberately not reconciled - Canela 2017's 'near exon 10' and 'at exon 12' are MOUSE Kmt2a exons.",
"the_listed_input_was_not_needed_and_could_not_have_worked": "This analysis named the GSE210480 CTCF ChIP-seq samples as 'the ONLY route to a coordinate for the exon-11 CTCF site'. That was wrong twice over. The series deposits COVERAGE bigWigs only, with no narrowPeak or BED peak calls in the supplement, so it could not have yielded a summit without peak calling the raw signal. And the coordinate was obtained without it, from ENCODE TFBS clusters plus a versioned Ensembl transcript - a desk job, not the costed cluster job. 'No coordinates published' was really 'no coordinates deposited either', and the route around it was cheaper than the route through it."
}- This analysis is most likely to DISSOLVE a striking claim rather than confirm one, and `genome-kmt2a-exon-11-ctcf-site` is written to survive that outcome. An analysis whose negative result requires rewriting an entry only helps if the rewrite actually happens.
- A coordinate result feels definitive in a way a literature result does not, and that is the risk: a single peak summit from one epithelial cell line, converted across a build and a numbering convention, can produce a confident number that is wrong in three independent ways at once. Report every conversion performed.
- What transcript does the DCAL exon convention number against? This graph uses DCAL numbering in its breakpoint entries and does not record its transcript basis, which means no exon number in those entries can currently be converted to a coordinate without an assumption.
- Which half of the BCR does the exon-11 CTCF site sit in? If it is telomeric, it sits in the half where therapy-related breakpoints are skewed, and the H3K9me1/2 mechanism gains a positional argument for being the therapy-related initiating mechanism specifically.
- Does a CTCF peak fall inside chr11:118,488,500-800 in the patients' own cells? PMID 34405474 mapped breaks, not CTCF, in those samples; the two would have to be joined against a haematopoietic CTCF reference.
- The one thing this analysis still cannot give is the CTCF peak SUMMIT and its motif orientation, because ENCODE cluster intervals are not summits and GSE210480 deposits no peak calls. Orientation matters if the element is a loop anchor, and it remains unmeasured.
- E1strong confidence 4 of 5: Replicated in peer-reviewed work by more than one group.paper
A highly conserved CTCF occupancy site lies within exon 11 of KMT2A inside the breakpoint cluster region, directly overlapping the strongest KDM3B ChIP-seq peak in the gene, and its occupancy falls on KDM3B depletion or doxorubicin while CTCF depletion alone is sufficient to generate KMT2A copy gains and rearrangements - but the paper gives NO genomic coordinates for the site, and its ChIP-qPCR primers are for the flanking site rather than the site itself.
Epigenetic balance ensures mechanistic control of MLL amplification and rearrangement. · Gray ZH; Chakraborty D; Duttweiler RR; Alekbaeva GD; Murphy SE; Chetal K; Ji F; Ferman BI; Honer MA; Wang Z; et al. · Cell 2023What this evidence cannot show
**Full text and STAR Methods read 2026-09-22 via efetch db=pmc on PMC10591855 (Europe PMC fullTextXML HTTP 500; <body> confirmed, 80,638 stripped characters).** The absence of coordinates is the point of this item: the site is identified only as 'exon 11 within the BCR', in the paper's own exon convention (exons 8-14 for the 8.3 kb interval), with no hg38 position, no motif orientation and no peak width. The CTCF ChIP is in RPE cells. The four deposited CTCF ChIP-seq samples in GSE210480 are the only route to a coordinate.
Evidence that argues against this (1)
- Calling a peak summit from the deposited data gives the coordinate in RPE cells, which may not be where CTCF sits in a haematopoietic cell; the ENCODE conservation claim in the paper is qualitative and cell-line-based. A coordinate derived this way is a coordinate for one cell type. NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus 2026
- E2established confidence 5 of 5: Multiple independent lines of evidence; treated as settled in the field.paper
The KMT2A major breakpoint cluster region spans intron 7 to exon 13 (~8.3 kb, DCAL exon numbering) and carries 98% of genomically characterised KMT2A rearrangements; within it, subregion B is exon 10 plus intron 10 (679 bp, 19.8% of breaks) and subregion C is exon 11 through exon 13 (5,026 bp, 39.5%); and the FUNCTIONAL cut point is the intron 10 / exon 11 boundary, because exons 11-16 encode the PHD1-PHD2-ePHD3 cluster whose inclusion is incompatible with transformation.
The KMT2A recombinome of acute leukemias in 2023. · Meyer C, Larghero P, Almeida Lopes B, et al. · Leukemia 2023What this evidence cannot show
**Not read for this entry.** These figures are imported from this graph's own `breakpoint-kmt2a-major-bcr`, which cites PMID 37019990 as its E1; the PMID was verified to resolve to that paper by PubMed esummary on 2026-09-22 but the paper itself was not retrieved here, and the subregion percentages should be re-read from it before being quoted alongside a coordinate result. The exon numbering is the DCAL convention; using it to locate a position requires knowing which transcript DCAL numbers against, which this item does not supply and which the analysis must establish.
Evidence that argues against this (1)
- Subregion C is 5,026 bp wide and carries 39.5% of breaks, so a finding that the CTCF site is 'in subregion C' or 'near the cut point' is compatible with being kilobases away from the boundary. The analysis must report base-pair distances, not containment. Iqbal Lab oncofusion knowledge graph 2026
- E3strong confidence 4 of 5: Replicated in peer-reviewed work by more than one group.paper
Low-input DSBCapture on normal, non-blast cells from AML patients in remission found breakage at the KMT2A intron 10 / exon 11 region, hg38 chr11:118,488,500-800, to be 2- to 10-fold higher in each KMT2A-rearranged patient than in each non-fusion patient with a significant 3.2-fold group average, while genome-wide median breakage did not differ between samples, and low-dose etoposide raised breakage there in the KMT2A-rearranged patients only.
Assessing acute myeloid leukemia susceptibility in rearrangement-driven patients by DNA breakage at topoisomerase II and CCCTC-binding factor/cohesin binding sites. · Atkin ND; Raimer HM; Wang Z; Zang C; Wang YH · Genes Chromosomes Cancer 2021What this evidence cannot show
**Imported from `gene-ctcf` E2 and not re-read here.** n = 3 patients per arm, adult, myeloid. The 300 bp interval is the window scored, not a feature position, and the study does not report whether a CTCF peak falls inside it in those cells. The build is stated as hg38 in this graph's record of it and should be reconfirmed from the paper before the coordinate is used as an anchor - a build mismatch is the commonest way this class of analysis goes wrong.
Evidence that argues against this (1)
- An elevated break rate in patients who developed a KMT2A fusion is a correlate of having had the disease, not necessarily a cause, and the same study found none of those patients' own partner genes among its 34 shared break-prone regions - so CTCF-site breakage is not a general account of where KMT2A fuses. Atkin ND; Raimer HM; Wang Z; Zang C; Wang YH 2021
- E4established confidence 5 of 5: Multiple independent lines of evidence; treated as settled in the field.database
This graph holds three mutually inconsistent exon-numbering conventions for the same 8.3 kb KMT2A breakpoint cluster region - intron 7 to exon 13 (breakpoint-kmt2a-major-bcr, DCAL convention), exons 5-11 (breakpoint-kmt2a-bcr-architecture, historic convention) and exons 8-14 (PMID 37788669) - so an exon number does not unambiguously identify a position across sources in this corpus.
Direct comparison of the stored region descriptions in breakpoint-kmt2a-major-bcr, breakpoint-kmt2a-bcr-architecture and the full text of PMID 37788669, read 2026-09-22 by the Q102 beat · Iqbal Lab oncofusion knowledge graph 2026What this evidence cannot show
**These are numbering-convention differences and NOT errors in any of the three sources** - each is internally consistent and each labels its convention (the graph entries carry `numbering_convention` and `bcr_exon_span_historic` fields, which is why the discrepancy was detectable at all). The claim is narrow: the conventions differ, so exon numbers cannot be used as a common frame. This beat did not determine which transcript each convention numbers against, which is the first thing the analysis must establish.
Evidence that argues against this (1)
- That the conventions are labelled is evidence the corpus is handling this correctly, not badly. The risk is not in the existing entries but in a future reader who takes 'exon 11' from one entry and 'exon 11' from another and treats them as the same position - which is what this analysis exists to prevent. Iqbal Lab oncofusion knowledge graph 2026
the one candidate whose design genuinely was unobtainable - its ~500 bp windows against 1 kb bins - and that was already corrected in cycle 59, so the audit found no NEW instance
places the CTCF site, the intron-10/exon-11 functional cut point and the patient break-prone window on one hg38 axis; the most likely outcome dissolves the convergence
also outputs a table of the three exon-numbering conventions this corpus holds for the same 8.3 kb, so an exon number becomes convertible
needs a CTCF peak summit called from GSE210480, the only route to a coordinate for the exon-11 site
runs the pre-registered coordinate overlap; its most-likely outcome did not occur
closes that analysis's own closing sentence, which said the summit could not be given
confirms that adjudication against the one source it could not read