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DNA hypomethylation affects cancer-related biological functions and genes relevant in neuroblastoma pathogenesis

ABSTRACT: Neuroblastoma pathogenesis has been reported to be closely associated with numerous genetic alterations. However, underlying DNA methylation patterns have not been extensively studied in this developmental malignancy. In this study, we generated microarray-based DNA methylation profiles of primary neuroblastic tumors. Stringent supervised differential methylation analyses allowed us to identify epigenetic changes characteristic for NB tumors as well as for clinical and biological subtypes of NB. We observed that gene-specific loss of DNA methylation is more prevalent than promoter hypermethylation. Overall, the differentially methylated genes showed that functional pathways affected by hypermethylation are different from those affected by hypomethylation. This study provides a comprehensive view of the global DNA methylation profile of NB tumors.

ORGANISM(S): Homo sapiens

PROVIDER: GSE39626 | GEO | 2012/10/29

SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA171296

REPOSITORIES: GEO

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Project description:Tumor tissue heterogeneity is a well known feature of several solid tumors. Neuroblastic Tumors (NTs) is a group of paediatric cancers with a great tissue heterogeneity. Most of NTs are composed of undifferentiated, poorly differentiated or differentiating neuroblastic (Nb) cells with very few or absent Schwannian stromal (SS) cells: these tumors are grouped as Neuroblastoma (Schwannian stroma-poor). The remaining NTs are composed of abundant SS cells and classified as Ganglioneuroblastoma (Schwannian stroma-rich) intermixed or nodular and Ganglioneuroma. The importance to understand Nb and SS gene signatures in NTs, is to clarify the complex network mechanism of tumor growth and progression. In order to identify the Nb and SS cells gene signatures, we analyzed the gene expression profiling of 19 cases of neuroblastic tumors: 10 stroma poor (NTs-SP) and 9 stroma rich (NTs-SR), by high density oligonucleotide microarrays. Moreover, the analysis was performed in parallel on both whole and laser microdissected tumor samples: from 4 of 19 cases, was isolated different areas all composed of pure cellular populations. We performed genome wide expression analysis by using Affymetrix technology and we used two different approaches for data analysis: SAM (Significance Analysis of Microarrays) and a method based on Game Theory (GT), to identify genes differently expressed in SS and Nb cells. Differently from the SAM method, the analysis based on GT (Moretti et al. (2006)) gives the advantage of selecting relevant genes not only according to the expression profile of each single gene, but considering also gene interaction. Experiment Overall Design: Tissue samples from 10 primary neuroblastoma stroma-poor (NTs-SP) and 9 ganglioneuroblastoma/ganglioneuroma stroma-rich (NTs-SR) tumors, were obtained at diagnosis from patients at different clinical stage. Frozen samples of NTs-SP had a minimum content of 90% of malignant cells, while NTs-SR had more than 80-90% of schwannian stromal cells. Four out of 19 NTs: 2 neuroblastomas (Schwannian stoma-poor) and 2 ganglioneublastomas (Schwannian stroma-rich), were further analyzed with laser microdissection.

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DNA hypomethylation affects cancer-related biological functions and genes relevant in neuroblastoma pathogenesis

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