Abstract
We have developed a gene expression profiling method called "high-coverage expression profiling" or HCEP. Using this method we have analyzed radiation response genes using cultured cell models. In contrast to DNA microarray technology, HiCEP is based on AFPL technique. Therefore it has excellent sensitivity and reproducibility for gene expression detection and could still be a powerful tool for gene expression profiling analysis of clinical specimen.
We analyzed gene expression profiles of breast tissues obtained from breast cancer patients. Using HiCEP we did comparative analysis of gene expression for 28,000 transcripts between metastatic and non-metastatic breast cancer tissue. As a result, 20 transcripts that remarkably overexpressed or underexpressed were detected and 17 of them were sequenced. Fourteen of 17 transcripts were categorized into known mRNA in the public database and 6 of 14 showed sequence similarity to cancer-related genes. Moreover, this cancer-related group was found to contain 2 alternative splicing variants of erbB2 (HER2) gene, which is used as a diagnostic marker to predict clinical outcome of breast cancer.
In this study we showed the effectiveness of the HiCEP gene expression profiling using clinical specimen. Further study would reveal radiation response or cancer-related marker genes from clinical materials.
