MICROSATELLITE-BASED CANCER-DETECTION USING CAPILLARY ARRAY ELECTROPHORESIS AND ENERGY-TRANSFER FLUORESCENT PRIMERS

The development of sensitive, rapid, and accurate methods and apparatu s for high-throughput short tandem repeat (STR) analysis will be criti cal for the use of microsatellite alteration in cancer screening. Here we show that STR-based bladder cancer diagnosis can be performed usin g capillary array electrophoresis and two-color labeling with energy-t ransfer (ET) fluorescent primers. Rapid (less than or equal to 35 min) separations are achieved on capillary arrays using replaceable separa tion matrices and the allelic ratios are quantitatively determined wit h a precision of +/- 10%. With this precision, a variation of 20 % was considered diagnostically significant. These methods provide a signif icant improvement in the speed, ease, and precision of STR analyses co mpared to slab gel electrophoresis.