Quantitative Measurement of Thymidylate Synthase and Dihydropyrimidine Dehydrogenase mRNA Level in Gastric Cancer by Real-time RT-PCR.

摘要

We used real-time reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to assay expression of the mRNA of thymidylate synthase (TS) and dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) in gastric cancer tissue with the objective of establishing a system to measure TS and DPD in ultra-low-volume samples. Nude mouse xenografts of 5 human gastric cancer cell lines and 85 clinical samples were used as the specimens in this study. Sensitivity to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) was determined on the basis of the relative tumor proliferation rate in mice and the results of ATP assay using serum-free cultures of the clinical samples. mRNA expression was measured in tumor tissue by real-time RT-PCR using the ABI PRISM 7700 system. The values for expression of the mRNA for TS and DPD were corrected according to the level of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase mRNA expression. The xenografts yielded correlations between TS and DPD mRNA expression and the activity of the enzymes (TS: rs = 0.700, DPD: rs = 0.900), and an