Institute seminar Wednesday December 15th Vessela Kristensen

Abstract:

Genetic and epigenetic interactions in the development of breast cancer?

Vessela Kristensen, Department of Genetics

Gene expression analysis of breast tumors have identified different breast cancer subgroups with differences in outcome for patients belonging the basal-like compared to the estrogene positive luminal-like subgroups (A and B). A number of miRNA s have been described by us and others to distinguish this subclassification and we were able to identify specific molecular pathways derived from joint analysis of miRNA and mRNA data in the breast cancer subtypes (Enerly et al 2010). Tumor subtype-specific CNAs (copy number alterations) reveal a subtype dependent features such as amplification of 12q for Luminal B, amplification of 10p in basal-like tumors, and frequent deletion of 16q in Luminal A (Nordgard et al 2008). Our recent sub-classification of the tumors based on DNA methylation reflected a clear distinction between Luminal A-like tumors and Basal-like/ERBB2-positive tumors (Fleischer et al, 2010 Rønneberg et al 2010). All these lines of evidence point to a common distinction of the separate molecular subclasses of breast cancer independent on the studied molecular end-points suggesting either a common predominant cellular or immunological characteristics or genetic background of the individuals in each subclass. With this in mind using the Illumina 109K and more recently the 660K SNP panel for whole genome analyses we studied the genetic background of 109 breast cancer individuals profiled by all these described above methods and attempted to identify controlling loci associated to both mRNA (Nordgard et al, manuscript) and miRNA expression, DNA methylation and amplification/deletion events (van Loo et al 2010).

Links:

Vessela Kristensen's research group

Vessela Kristensen's publications

Department of Genetics

Institute for Cancer Research

Institute seminars, autumn 2010