Breast Cancer Genes Identified by Loss of Heterozygosity

摘要

We are working to develop a novel genomic subtraction method to rapidly identify all chromosomal regions that undergo Loss of Heterozygosity (LOH) in breast cancer. LOH is a major mechanism in the genomic alteration that transforms a normal cell into an unregulated tumor cell. The identification of all regions of LOH will identify causative genes and gene interactions and will yield new understanding of the etiology and pathogenesis of breast cancer and lead to new approaches to detection and treatment. We designed several genomic subtraction methods to isolate enriched populations of DNA fragments representing LOH regions in individual breast cancer cell lines. Our approach exploits the minor degree of DNA sequence heterogeneity expected between the members of each chromosome pair. Genomic subtraction requires presence/absence differences, and we transform the DNAs to create such differences.