High Throughput Analysis of the Role of Genomic Methylation in Breast Cancer by Methylation-Sensitive Comparative Genomic Hybridization

摘要

Cancer results from abnomalities in critical genes that regulate normal cellular growth and development. These abnormalities arise in two classes of interacting genes: those that facilitate cell growth and tumor formation, whose over expression induces cancer, and those that inhibit these process whose loss or mutation causes cancer. Genes that belong to the second category are called tumor suppressor genes. These tumor suppressor genes can be inactivated by two different mechanisms. One mechanism involves the mutation of the coding sequences within the gene. The other mechanism, which is being increasingly appreciated more and more, is the inactivation of the tumor suppressor genes by promoter methylation. These promoters are portions of DNA sequences found closed to the starting portion of the gene and often undergo changes in their molecular structure (methylation) thereby preventing effective transcription of these genes. This project aims at developing software tools to find out these areas which are rich is CpG.