Aggressiveness of human melanoma xenograft models is promoted by aneuploidy-driven gene expression deregulation.

ABSTRACT: Melanoma is a devastating skin cancer characterized by distinct biological subtypes. Besides frequent mutations in growth- and survival-promoting genes like BRAF and NRAS, melanomas additionally harbor complex non-random genomic alterations. Using an integrative approach, we have analysed genomic and gene expression changes in human melanoma cell lines (N=32) derived from primary tumors and various metastatic sites and investigated the relation to local growth aggressiveness as xenografts in immuno-compromised mice (N=22). Although the vast majority >90% of melanoma models harbored mutations in either BRAF or NRAS, significant differences in subcutaneous growth aggressiveness became obvious. Unsupervised clustering revealed that genomic alterations rather than gene expression data reflecte

SUBMITTER: Mathieu V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3380575 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature