CANDIDATE REGIONS FOR A TESTICULAR CANCER SUSCEPTIBILITY GENE

Epidemiological data suggest the presence of a susceptibility gene for testicular cancer in some families. Families with multiple cases of t esticular cancer are rare and almost all those reported have only two affected members. We have performed a sib-pair analysis on 35 families in which there are either two or three affected brothers. These famil ies have been typed for 220 autosomal microsatellite markers spaced 10 -20 cM throughout the genome, Six regions which gave a LOD score of mo re than 1.0 on formal linkage analysis or a P value of 0.05 or less us ing a non-parametric approach are considered as candidate regions for a susceptibility gene, Of particular interest is one region on chromos ome 4. Two neighbouring probes in this region both scored positively w ith LOD score of 2.60 on multipoint analysis. An International Testis Cancer Linkage Consortium has been formed to pool resources and will i nvestigate these findings further with the world-wide collection of fa milies.