Pinpointing Lung Cancer Genes

Cancer researchers have used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array technology to pinpoint the location of deletions and amplifications in genes involved in lung cancer.

Investigators at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, MA, USA; www.dfci.harvard.edu) analyzed about115,000 single nucleotide polymorphism loci from 70 primary human lung carcinoma specimens and 31 cell lines derived from human lung carcinomas. In addition to previously characterized loci, two regions of homozygous deletion and three regions of high-level amplification were found. These results were published in the July 2005 issue of Cancer Research.

"In a previous study, we showed that SNP arrays offer a unique way of locating copy-number changes in cell chromosomes and of determining when genes on a pair of chromosomes are mismatched,” said senior author, Dr. Matthew Meyerson, professor of pathology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. "The current study demonstrates that high-resolution SNP technology is powerful enough to identify copy-number alterations that previously had not been found in lung cancer cells. We will need to characterize the genes in these regions in detail to understand their role and whether they are cancer-causing or cancer-preventing genes.”





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Dana-Farber Cancer Institute