Poster presentation, P158

Official XXIst International Pigment Cell Conference website - 21-24 Sept 2011, Bordeaux - France | updated: September 04 2011

CpG island methylation and gene silencing in melanoma

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Melanocytes can give rise to a variety of benign and malignant neoplasms that differ in their genomic and proteomic profiles. The identification of suitable biomarkers would be useful to improve clinical diagnosis and treatment options for melanoma patients. METHODS: We examined differences in protein expression between melanoma and melanocytes by 2D-PAGE, studied mRNA transcriptional levels by RT-PCR and used bisulfite sequencing to assess whether CpG island methylation states correlated with observed expression differences. RESULTS: We found highly significant differences in the expression of some proteins between melanomas and melanocytes. For most of these mRNA and protein levels were correlated indicating that down-regulation occurs at the RNA level. We identified differential CpG island methylation but this was not always associated with down-regulation, nor did down-regulation necessarily correlated with CpG methylation. CONCLUSION: The proteins identified to be down-regulated in melanoma have known roles in survival, proliferation and apoptosis. While CpG island methylation of promoters may contribute to transcriptional deregulation of some gene, our results indicate that there are likely to be other factors contributing to gene silencing.

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